January 9, 2020
Pause buttons and audio in timeline not synced
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January 9, 2020
Pause buttons and audio in timeline not synced
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I have slides where the audio needs to be paused until the user clicks buttons.

I am having an issue where the button pauses on the timeline don’t really pause the audio where they should. The further along in the timeline, the more the audio pauses are off. The first few audio pauses are spot-on, but the further along you go in the audio, the worse the delayed pause effect is. For example, if I want the the first few pauses at 0:03, 0:05, and 0:09, those pauses will work fairly well, and will pause at around 0:03, 0:05, and 0:09. However, if I want the audio to pause at 0:30, I have to set the pause at 0:28… two whole seconds earlier. The effect is cumulative, so by the time I get to 1:35 in the audio, the pauses have to be adjusted by a lot. How do you solve this issue, other than moving the button pauses to weird areas, to compensate?

I also tried using a Click Box to get the same effect; that worked, and the audio paused at the correct time, but there was a one-second delay before the audio started back up again, which is not a good User Experience.

Using: Captivate 2019 version 11.5.1.499

5 Comments
2020-01-22 20:51:05
2020-01-22 20:51:05

This is a problem I’ve run into myself, have notified the Adobe support team of, and they’ve confirmed is an issue. The closest work-around I’ve been able to figure out is adding additional space in the audio file where I want the pauses to occur later in the audio file.

At the first point where I want to pause a slide, I’ll add one second of silence in my audio and I’ll place the smart shape to pause the slide just after the silence begins. As I add more smart shapes to pause the slide I’ll gradually increase the silence at those pause points in my audio.

The attached image shows one second of silence at the first pause and about two seconds of silence later on. Adding silence where the pauses occur allows the project to continue playing in sync with the audio without making it apparent to the person viewing the file that something is wrong. It’s not an ideal workaround, but it’s all I can think of to do until the bug is fixed.

Attachment

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Michael Stephens
's comment
2020-01-23 09:36:43
2020-01-23 09:36:43
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Michael Stephens
's comment

Was also my proposed solution, but I don’t use ‘silence’ in the audio file, but ‘noise’ (like you always can copy/paste in an audio file) to make it less apparent. It is indeed a problem for slide audio.

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2020-01-13 20:09:00
2020-01-13 20:09:00

Thanks for the response, Lieve. Yes, I was talking about Slide Audio. I can’t apply the audio to an object because there’s a requirement to use closed captions.

As a workaround, I am simply moving my pauses in the timeline so they match up with the pauses in the audio, but this is a bad, cumbersome workaround.

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ronh78218335
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2020-01-14 09:12:02
2020-01-14 09:12:02
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ronh78218335
's comment

Remember that you can split slides in multiple slides without the learner seeing that this is happening. Will reduce loading time on each slide because audio clips are smaller.

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2020-01-13 08:33:20
2020-01-13 08:33:20

Question is not totally clear to me: I suppose you talk about slide audio, and about the option ‘Pause audio’ which you can have on normal slide (not on question nor D&D slides) in the Properties panel of the interactive object. Since you know in that case on front where the pause will occur, why not edit the audio file and insert some ‘noise’ in between the audio parts? Moreover try to limit the slide duration, or if you do not need CC to replace slide audio by object audio or the Play Audio command. I have a blog here in the portal about Timeline and Audio.

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