Storyline Bad Behavior

Just prior to an important review of my course, the review was delayed due to some very odd behaviors in Storyline. This course was built with lots of layers, a couple of embedded videos, and lots of triggers to make things so that the learner had to click things in order, to trigger different audio clips, and many other things. This file was 685 MB. The file also contained multiple scenes from a previous project. Up to this point, it had been behaving well, but there were a lot of timing issues to get right.

While making the course behave seamlessly in the tool's preview, it began to act unpredictably in Review 360. Suddenly, audio was overlapping each other, and the most odd part - one screen had 4 individual timed panels that would slide in, and trigger audio. On this slide, the audio would follow the first panel, but all of a sudden audio from next slides started to play on the panels for this slide. In other places, audio seemed missing, or would start off timing. Where in preview there was audio on an element, suddenly there was nothing but silence. Yes when checked upon in Storyline, the audio was still there and enabled to play.

Should we break the course into sections, what if that doesn't fix the multitude of problems? Perhaps we may have to have reviewers review the course in our LMS, then manually comment (that would be a pain; we've trained them to use Review 360). Guess what? same behaviors in the LMS. Now what?

We first decided to remove older scenes that did not pertain to this course. These scenes did not have a lot of slides, but they did have a few (around 20), with audio - in other words, slides from another complete course. This reduced the file size to 640 MB. Problem solved. 

I felt like Articulate and others should know about this. It was a very nerve-wracking experience; one that I was unable to find documented anywhere. I would think it did not have anything to do with the fact that we were forced to 64 bit this week, but I suppose anything is possible.