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tvcca26887288
Known Participant
February 17, 2017
Question

Publishing with mp3s vs wav files

  • February 17, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 2715 views

So, I get why Captivate converts an mp3 to a wav file. But as I understand it, it's not supposed to use those wav files when it publishes.

I replaced all of my wavs with mp3s to lower the published file size, but have barely seen any difference whatsoever. My HTML5 zip folder was around 61000KB when I was using wavs and since I replaced them with mp3s, the size has only decreased to 59000. I was expecting it to drop far more drastically. The only thing I can figure is that when Captivate copied all my mp3s to wav files it also decided it was going to publish the wavs.

Is there a way to prevent it from using the .wav file when publishing?

Alternatively, could the cause of the bloating be something unrelated to the audio files?

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

B
brendanc52884453
Participating Frequently
October 30, 2017

Lilybiri​ Captiv8r​

I’m sorry to beat this topic into the ground, but I have a follow-up question that relates to this topic: is there any way to prevent Captivate from converting the audio files to mp3 and, instead, utilize the actual wav format?

I’m asking because the LMS is not playing the audio files when I test my course in Firefox.  Each mp3 receives a 500 error from the server.  I know that the issue is server related because of the 500 error and because it works fine on every other server I test on.

I imagine the time it will take to coordinate the right teams to resolve the server conflict will be longer than my deadline. So I’d like to test publishing the course with wav files instead and test that on the LMS, but I don’t think there’s a way to actually do that in 2017.

Any thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

- Brendan

Lilybiri
Lilybiri
Legend
October 30, 2017

Brendan, the file size of wav files is huge! Look in the Library and compare those sizes with the resulting mp3's. You'll never want the raw Photoshop files to be included in the output neither. There should be a way to solve the server conflict.

T
tvcca26887288Author
Known Participant
February 21, 2017

Wow I didn't think embedding YouTube videos would take up that much room since it's drawing in the videos from elsewhere, but I've got a few of them so that must be the cause of the large file size. Thanks for the info!

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
February 21, 2017

Hi there

It's my own understanding that nothing is actually stored in the Captivate output for YouTube. It's totally drawn from YouTube when required.

Cheers... Rick :)

Lilybiri
Lilybiri
Legend
February 21, 2017

I was not talking about Youtube, but about 'embedded videos'.

Lilybiri
Lilybiri
Legend
February 17, 2017

When publishing Captivate is converting wav's to mp3. Same for images which will be compressed as well. For that reason I recommend to use wav files, instead of custom mp3 files, much better quality will be had when you let Captivate compress the wav-files to mp3 when publishing. The decrease you have seen will probably be due to different compression settings, but it is normal that you will not really have a smaller file size when importing mp3 instead of wav files. If the wav files would have been in the published file, it would have a much larger file size. Audio files are responsible for increasing file size, but also embedded video, and using images that are scaled down in Captivate instead of having the proper size/resolution.

M
michaelm71636120
Inspiring
February 21, 2017

I do not quite understand why you recommend using wav's. As far as I understand it is as follows:

- If you use a wav, Captivate will convert the wav into an MP3 in the published file.

- If you use an MP3, Captivate will use exactly this MP3 in the published file (without any modifications). Additionally, Captivate will create a wav which can be found in the library but which is not used in the published course.

So if you use an MP3 with perfect audio quality, quality should remain perfect in the end product. Or am I mistaken?

M
michaelm71636120
Inspiring
February 23, 2017

It doesn't really matter for the file size, since the wav's will be compressed to mp3 when publishing. Since mostly audio is edited in Captivate, I have recommended to always insert wav-files instead of mp3 to avoid quality loss.

Sorry about the misunderstanding of 'embedded' versus 'linked'.


Thank you Lilybiri and Captiv8r for clarifying things! So let me summarize:

- If you import an MP3 and do not touch the created wav, Captivate will export precisely the unchanged mp3.

- If you import an mp3 and change the created wav (by editing the audio inside Captivate), Captivate will take the wav and create a new mp3 from that when publishing the course.

In the second case it is better to import a wav in order to avoid quality loss by unnecessary transformations of file format.

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