Captivate Classic Poor Audio After Publish

Uninstalling CP Classic 11.8.3 and installing CP Classic 11.8.2.254 to my new laptop has fixed my issue. The published output no longer has crackling, popping, or other audio artifacts. Not sure what's up with that, but happy it is resolved. Will upgrade to the New Adobe Captivate at some point here... thank you all for your suggestions. 🙂

This issue can sometimes be encountered when a project with background audio is published as MP4 video output and there is no slide audio in the very first slide of the project.  Under these specific conditions the background audio seems to duplicate itself, overlapping the main slide audio.

Adobe's recommended solution is to add a short half-second audio clip containing some silence to the beginning of the very first slide.

Captivate 2019 can also sometimes have problems with audio that has a high bitdepth.

Ideally any audio file added to Captivate should be WAV format (uncompressed) and be 16 bit PCM.

Check the format of your audio files and make sure they are 16 bit PCM, not 24 bit or 32 bit (like the example below).

When you publish to MP4 video, check the publish settings to ensure the audio is not being compressed too much.  Though that usually tends to cause a loss of quality and "whooshiness" rather than cracking or popping.