Captivate 8 - 'Play Audio' as part of an advanced action doesn't play the audio

[ericekman]

Hello. I was hoping you all could help me, as I can't figure out why what I'm currently doing doesn't work.

I've got a slide where I am explaining the answers to a game earlier in the captivate. Each question is a hyperlink that executes an advanced action. That action is currently to show a grouped set of objects (highlight box to mask the rest of the screen and two boxes with text captions). The top of each box has a red X that I am using as a button. Clicking that button launches an advanced action that simply hides all these objects.

Screen without a caption box:

Screen with a caption box:

My timeline:

I am trying to add audio to these text explanations, but am unable to get the audio to play. I edited the advanced actions for the hyperlinks to read "Show H1" (the grouped objects for that question) in the first line and "Play audio H1.wav" in the second line. I also changed the advanced actions connected to the red Xs to be "Hide H1" and "Stop Triggered Audio".

Unfortunately, when I do this, the audio does not play. From my limited knowledge of captivate, updating the advanced actions to what you see above should cause a specific audio file to play when they click the hyperlink and that audio to stop when the red X is clicked. Currently, the audio does not play.

Does anyone know what I overlooked for this not to function properly?

Thank you so much for any responses. 

[Lilybiri · Accepted solution]

It should indeed work, have no time to test and don't see immediately the origin of the issue.

However, wouldn't it be easier to attach that audio clip to the text in the group Hx? It will only play when the group appears.

Update: I tested this out in Captivate 9, with the example I created for the blog post: Playing with Captivate 9 - Captivate blog

It works perfectly for me: I added a Play audio command to the shared action I used to show the lightbox, and Stop Triggered audio to the Close button action.

I did test both in Browser and in HTML browser to check if it is working for SWF and HTML output. For such a command I never had the experience that I should have to publish to have it functioning, maybe I'm lucky.

This is the shared action, I used Change State instead of showing Lightbox, the Show action is for the Close button.

For the Close button:

Sorry that I couldn't test on 8.

[ericekman]

Thank you all very much for your thorough replies. I was able to get it to work by attaching the audio to the text, as Lily suggested, and then using the 'stop triggered' audio on the X button to stop the audio. After getting everything working, I'll play around to see why the original method was not working. Maybe it has something to do with not making them shared actions (to be honest, I don't know what makes an action "shared"). If I find another solution, I'll post it for future reference.

Thanks again, you all are real lifesavers!

[RodWard]

Before you conclude that it's not working. Try publishing completely and then upload to a web server or LMS to test from there.  Sometimes issues are only present when you test locally.

[rgcunningham]

Does your advanced action also include navigation to a different slide.  I've found that if that is so, the navigation happens before the audio has a chance to play.

In Captivate 9, I can use the Delay Next Action action to delay the navigation long enough to play the audio.

Just a possibility.

[Lilybiri]

Bob, there is a screenshot of the advanced action. He is just showing a lightbox, no navigation to another slide.

[rgcunningham]

Thanks.  I just thought there might be another line below what was shown.