Prior to Adobe Captivate 5, content developers or authors had very little control over the volume of audio while recording narration in a project. Adobe Captivate used to calibrate your audio input automatically — you would not know how the audio sounds until completing the recording and listening to it.

Manual calibration in Adobe Captivate 5 lets you decide the audio input levels before recording. Using this feature, you can record a sample voice, listen to the recorded voice, and tweak the settings as required. You can repeat the process till you achieve the desired audio quality and then, record the narration to your project.

To manually calibrate your audio input:

1. Connect an appropriate audio recording device to your computer.

2. Open Adobe Captivate 5 and click Audio > Audio Settings.



Audio Menu

The ‘Audio Settings’ dialog box appears.

3. Select the recording device in the Audio Input Devices section and then, click ‘Calibrate Input’. The Calibrate Audio Input dialog box appears.

Sound Calibration

4. Click ‘Record’ to record a sample narration..

5. Speak in your audio input device and click ‘Stop’ to stop the recording.

6. Click ‘Play’ to listen to the recorded sample audio file.

7. To modify the audio levels, click the pre-amplifier value and type a new value. The following illustration shows the range of values you can specify and the effect of the value on the audio volume:

Volume levels

After you achieve the required audio quality, click OK. You can now start recording the narration for your project.

Adobe Captivate 5 provides automatic calibration of audio too. To calibrate audio automatically:

1. Connect an appropriate audio recording device to your computer.
2. Open Adobe Captivate 5 and click Audio > Audio Settings. The ‘Audio Settings’ dialog box appears.
3. Select the recording device in the Audio Input Devices section and then, click ‘Calibrate Input’. The Calibrate Audio Input dialog box appears.
4. Click ‘Auto Calibrate’ and start speaking into the microphone.  The following message appears: ‘Checking Input Level’

After a while, when Adobe Captivate completes analyzing the audio input levels, calibration stops . The message, ‘Input Level OK’  appears.