Audio clipping at the front of slides

[MarkWFD]

Hi all

I have a 60 slide project with  project that has voice audio (WAVs) on about 50 slides - generally starting at the beginning of the slides (as opposed to some way down into the timeline). It previews OK. However, when I publish the project the audio on some of the slides comes in late - missing/clipping the first couple of words. I have tried moving the audio away from the start of the slide but this doesn't seem to fix the problem, I have tried both MP3s and wavs and the problem still happens. Has anyone any solutions/suggestions? I have re-published several times with no real improvement. The project was originally recorded in 6 and is currently being edited in 9 - would this have any importance?

Many thanks in advance

Here's hoping for some help!

Mark

[RodWard]

If you carefully look at one of the audio clips, is there almost no silence at the beginning of the clip?  Has it been trimmed so that the voiceover starts immediately?

If so, you may need to ensure there is a half second or so of low-level audio BEFORE the voiceover starts.

If this audio is TTS generated, then there will be absolutely no sound before the generated voice kicks in, and in some cases that results in the first syllable getting clipped off.  The issue is not as common with recorded voiceover because the microphone always picks up a small amount of sound in the background.  It's this background noise that some developers like to clip off, but then run into the issue you have found.

[MarkWFD]

Thanks - There does seem to be silence at the front of the clips but I will try adding some extra in if the problem reappears. Currently the solution seems to be moving the offending audio files future down the timeline so they start at about a second. Seems to work but the client is likely to start saying it's slowed up too much..

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

The important thing is that the silence before the clip must not be PURE silence containing no audio data, otherwise Captivate will actually remove that part of the waveform at runtime and this can cause your issue where the first part of the voice gets clipped. 

So if you add silence to the beginning of the voiceover it needs to be 'dirty silence', meaning that it must contain at least SOME low-level noise so that Captivate does not mess with it.  I usually just cut and paste some of the low-level background noise from between some voiceover sentences.

However, remember that there will only be pure silence in between sentences or words in TTS speech.  So that silence is of no use to you in this situation.

[MarkWFD]

Thanks so much for the info - much appreciated.