Audio not playing after navigating multiple slides back in HTML5

Does this happen to HTML5 content when played on a desktop browser, or only on a mobile device?

I’ve never tried patching Captivate 6 to fix this issue. Captivate 7/8 that I do use still have that issue unfortunately, however if you don’t need the feature for a course (I did not), what I did was to just force turning off the multi audio track (channel) feature in the code (I did that by setting cp.multiAudioTrack to false in index_SCORM.html at the start of the initializeCP function. By default cp.multiAudioTrack is enabled on browsers that support it. You can patch index_SCORM (or whichever template version of the index you are using, including the preview ones) in the publish templates or in the output course post-publishing – I have some versioning scripts set up to backup/patch and restore original versions of the Captivate core files for various scenarios – for patches if I’m using playbars I usually put them in the playbar code because I can do that without having to change much in terms of the original files. I put conditional hooks in the templates to call initializers in the playbar code at critical points once it’s been loaded but before the full captivate initialization.

In Captivate 6, Adobe still had the core javascript functions accessible in the installation folders as opposed to now they hide it in DLLs (at least on Windows). The relevant code is in the file CPLibrary.js. On Windows, that file is located in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 6 x64\HTML\assets\js\CPLibrary.js. In that version, Adobe sets the maximum number of audio channels just before they initialize them as opposed to setting a configuration value, so you would probably have to patch that file in order to affect it. Try locating the following code:

if(cp.device == cp.IDEVICE)

this.MAX_AUDIO_CHANNELS = 1;

else

this.MAX_AUDIO_CHANNELS = 10;

and patch it to:

if(true||cp.device == cp.IDEVICE)

this.MAX_AUDIO_CHANNELS = 1;

else

this.MAX_AUDIO_CHANNELS = 10;

the idea is to only have it allocate one channel vs. 10 – again not sure if that will fix it in CP6, but it does the job in CP7 and CP8. bviously from the code you can see that some devices require this setting. You could also try reducing the number of channels allocated (e.g changing 10 to 2 or 3) to see what effect that has.

I’d have to try it myself to see if that would still work back to CP6, but it eliminated the problem for my courses in CP7 and CP8. The problem is something to do with there being 10 channels available in the multichannel scenario and something being mismanaged there under certain circumstances. I haven’t had time to figure out exactly what, so that is a workaround for the time being.

Hope this helps someone - let me know if it works for you. Always remember to backup the original files if you make any patches to core installed Captivate files, and keep in mind that updates to Captivate may overwrite your changes, so keep a copy of the changes separately and re-patch and check if necessary after updates.

Your mileage may vary (disclaimer).

I'm also experiencing random audio loss after navigation on relatively small presentations published from 7 & 8 to HTML 5. I can find no pattern that would indicate the cause as yet.

I'll put together a quick presentation and test now.

The issue is not limited to a single course, it's been everything published to HTML5 so far. The course does not have to be published in order for issues to occur - they can simply be previewed in HTML5 and the audio will drop out.

It only seems to be audio files that have been previously accessed and are recalled by navigating back.