Audio attached to an object sometimes clips the last second or two

[charliem82825372]

In my project, a number of slides are built where upon entering the slide, a smart shape button object displays with text and pauses at 1.5 seconds. Upon clicking the button, an Advanced Action is triggered and the playhead advances through the slide. One of the objects at about 3 seconds is a shape object with audio attached - maybe a 5-second narration. Let's call this shape ABC.

When previewing, everything works fine, including all the Advanced Action logic that shows and hides objects and also jumps the play head around. So there is some complexity, but it all works fine.

However, after actually publishing the project, some of the ABC objects, with the 5-second narration, have the tail end of the audio cut off. And, it's not always the same slides that exhibit this behavior. All the slides in question have plenty of room for the audio to play. And other objects with audio attached don't seem to have this problem. I know the playhead is still moving because I'm monitoring the current frame number.

So, to summarize:

-- enter the slide

-- playhead pauses at 1.5 seconds and only one smart shape object is visible

-- click the smart shape and playhead advances, and another obect with audio attached is visible

That object with audio attached sometimes has its last second or so cut off. About 25 slides are structured this way and the problem occurs intermittently and on different slides. This problem only reveals itself after publishing -- previews work fine.

Any ideas about how to fix this would be most helpful.

[Lilybiri · Accepted solution]

It would be much easier to understand your question if you had inserted screenshots: Timeline (to see the pausing points and names), Advanced actions to mention the most important.

Audio files can be very big and for HTML output they will be loaded On Enter for each slide. This can lead to some loss of synchronization and the cpInfoCurrentFrame is not always a good indicator for where the audio is at that moment. For Slide audio it is recommended to have a gap before the audio timeline for that reason as you may be aware of. That is not possible for Object audio which you are using here. I always add some dirty silence (noise) at the start and the end of the audio clip to mimick the recommended setup for slide audio.

Object audio plays as long as the object is visible. More info about Audio and the Timeline in this blog:

Pausing Timeline and Audio clips - eLearning (adobe.com)

[charliem82825372]

Hi Lilybiri, your comments are very helpful and I know it would be helpful to post screenshots and relevant AA files, which I may do. However, your comments about adding some noise at the head and tail in the clip make a lot of sense to me. I actually downloaded some audio to use to do just that.

My current narration files are AI voices from murf ai, so there is pure silence, or actual audio. As you know, Captivate is persnikety about adding pure silence - it won't do so. I'll try to adjust my clips as you suggest and see if that fixes the problem. 

Thanks!

[Lilybiri]

Sure...had to look up 'persnikety', new word to me. I am not a native English speaker as you may know. English is my third language.

Let me know if this works, please.

[charliem82825372]

I sure will. Just going to get through padding a couple dozen audio tracks
with head tail quiet noise and see if that helps.

Thanks!

[charliem82825372]

Adding a bit of low-level noise at the head and tail of my tracks seems to have solved the problem.

Since I don't think the audio editor in Captivate lets me paste an mp3 clip, I used Audacity to open my tracks, pasted in the noise clips, saved the tracks out as new wav files, then updated the audio properties of the shapes objects. Whew!

So far, so good. Now that I know about the clipping behavior, I'll assemble my tracks as needed ahead of time.

Thanks for all your help! (And you, too Rod.)

[Lilybiri]

Great! Is it possible, for the sake of other users with a similar issue, to mark an answer as being correct?

[RodWard]

Is this audio narration created using Captivate's Text-to-Speech voices, or is it actual voiceover audio?

[charliem82825372]

Hi Rod, I am actually using voicese from murk ai. so there is pure silence, no ambient room tone. I am going to try Lilibiri's suggestion adding some noise. Thannks!

[RodWard]

Yes.  That is what I would suggest as well.  Even recording a small amount of very low level white noise that is inaudible to the ear is usually enough to prevent Captivate from clipping the final split second of generated audio (if that is in fact the problem).