All Audio Issues Here

I too am importing external files recorded in Audacity. However when I go to edit the timing on a few of these audio imorted 128K 44Khz MP3 voice over files, Captivate wants to create it's own audio clips in the library and when exported sounds muffled. So the audio throughout the presentation is inconsistent when it hits these "captivated" audio clips.

I have't seen any info on how (or why) Captivate handles imported clips when you splice or edit them using their audio editor. They sound good in preview mode but now when published. I wish there was some Help documentaion so I knew what it was trying to do so I can work around this issue. I have a deadline and do not want to show the client this version of the tutorial.

Im having a problem with audio playing in FireFox. I imported WAV files into Captivate 2, both into backgrounds and caption objects. All play well in IE but I have only silence in FireFox. Has anyone found a fix for this?

Maybe someone can help me with my issue.

After creating a swf file from Captivate2, I find that the playback is muffled when the balance slider on the Windows wav mixer is in the middle. If I pan the slider to the left or right, the sound quality is perfect. How can I acheive the same quality output when the slider is in the middle? Or, do you instruct the listener to adjust this setting??

One other note- it is good practice to use an external sound editor to compress (and edit) the sound file before inserting it into your Captivate 2 project. I honestly do not believe the audio encoder inside Captivate 2 is up to par. I have had very consistent results by following this method. I had mixed results using Captivate 2 only for the audio. Just something I noticed from experience. Hope it helps. :)

My teams haven't run into the problem despite importing hundreds of clips a week this past couple of months - and if the audience of about 18,000 have experienced it during playback, no one has mentioned it.

However, the problem must exist because I recall others mentioning it, too.

The reason I'm writing now is to perhaps proactively avoid the issue popping up for us in the future, which would be a royal disaster.

I'm curious whether you're importing WAV files or MP3 files, and whether you're putting the audio directly on the slide (main timeline) or putting some or all of the audio into caption objects. For comparison, our audio clips come to us as 32-bit, 44100Hz MP3 files. We drop each one onto the slide background (the main timeline), and attach closed captions. When we publish out the project, audio is being compressed to 36Kbps, 22.050 KHz, with the Encoding Speed set to best quality (zero on the slider).

How does your process compare?

Yes, I too have experienced the incredibly frustrating way captivate handles audio files - the echoing, looping, sometimes not even showing up on the published files! I have experienced these issues on more than one station. The software is far from being polished and has numerous issues . . . audio being one of them.

My 'fix' when the echoing occurs is to go to 'Audio' > 'Edit Timing' > then move one of the sliders just enough so that captivate knows there has been a change in the audio timing and it will 'recompile' the audio file. Then hit update and this seems to work . . .