Why?

I have been writing quite a few posts about the Timeline, and maybe you also viewed the interactive presentation for which I posted  a link in this article. At that moment it was not possible to include a published Captivate file in a blog post here, as I could in my personal blog. This feature is now available, and I wanted to try it out with another interactive movie. You are welcome to play with it, it is rescalable HTML output. Give feedback to the portal developers (maybe also to me?).

Audio types

The way different types of audio react to an absolute Pause of the timeline, and to a Pausing point (slide related or related to an interactive object) is probably the most difficult to understand. Audio can be played in Captivate in 4 ways:

1. Background audio: is the most insenstive to pausing. It can only be paused by the Pause button on a default playbar. It cannot be paused by a custom Pause button or the command Pause, and also never by a pausing point. The project in the movie has no background audio (find it distracting for most eLearning courses).
2. Slide audio: is synchronized with the slide timeline (which is the reason why the CC feature only works for slide audio). It will be paused by an absolute Pause, possible with the Pause command, the Pause button on the playbar or a custom Pause button. However the situation is totally different for a Pausing point. It is not paused by default by the pausing point of an interactive object, but can be paused by checking the option ‘Stop Slide Audio’ in the Options tab. However pausing points linked to slides (question slide, score slide, D&D slide) or interactive learning interactions (like the games) will never stop slide audio.
3. Object audio: is audio attached to an object. It can be paused by an absolute Pause, but there is no way to do this with any Pausing Point. These three types of audio can be managed in the Audio Management dialog box as you’ll see at the end of the movie.
4. The most recent way to play Audio is using the Play Audio command as standalone (simple) action or in an advanced/shared action. This type of audio can NOT be paused at all, not by an absolute Pause, not by a Pausing point. It can only be paused by the command Stop Triggered Audio. Contrary to what most users think, you don’t need to launch that command to allow playing another audio clip with Play Audio. When a new clip is launched, the first one will be stopped automatically.

Interactive movie