Audio & Captivate: Looking for best practice

Report · Oct 03, 2011

Good Morning,

i'am looking for some sort of best practice, handling a lot of audios within single captivate slides. Please let us take a look at the workflow:

I write concepts in Word or OpenOffice, describing on a slide-base the content, media (pics, animations, ...), interactions
The client read these concepts, and write a reading report with all changes, additions
We held a harmonisation meeting for every 3-5 hours calculated e-learning-concepts, argueing about the clients annotations and looking for a stable agreement
I produce the first version, in this case with Adobe Captivate, and for the audios i use text2speech.
The client checks this first Version, send me his audit report.
I produce version 1.

So, where is the problem? My problem is the handling of the audio-files, up to 10 per slide. In version 1, all audios are spoken by professional speakers from german radio-stations, recorded in our own studio. And i'am looking for a comfortable way to exchange all synthetic audios without leaving anything within captivate, the final version must be as clean and slim as possible.

For the handling and tracking i use AlienBrain, because in some projects, we have a few hundred of thousands assets to watch and track ... and it is no problem if anything wents wrong, just some clicks and i've restored the older version of a pic, audio or a complete project.

Using other tools, i do not care about this. Within the project-folders, they are stored within a modul-based audio-folder. And every single audio-files as an unique identifer (A024_37_12_004.mp4, "A" for Audio, then chapter_module_page_sequentialnumberperpage.mp4/mp3/wav). After i have recieved the spoken audios from the studio, i just overwrite the synthetic audios and the "real" audios are automatically embedded in my slides, so if i make a new release, everything is fine. Older, synthetic version kept by AlienBrain.

In Captivate, everything seems to be ... hm, i have to be polite 😉 ... a little more complicated. Or even worse, i'am unable to see the solution. Maybe somebody may share a working and fast way for the needed audio-procedure? Or something like a proofed workaround?

Kind regards

Marc 🙂

Report · Oct 04, 2011

First suggestion: if you have eLearning Suite, use roundtripping to Audition to replace all audio.

Lilybiri

Report · Oct 04, 2011

There's nothing greatly wrong with your workflow per se. I also use TTS for the initial rough version of my project in Captivate. But I actually use a Mind Mapping software app (MindManager) to work out the course information architecture and Learning Objectives first, rather than use MS Word or some other document tool. I find the clients are less likely to interfere too much this way, but they like the fact that it gives them a visual representation of the information map.

Captivate does not allow you to externalise all objects. For example, you can externalise SWFs, widgets, skin and FMV slide content (FLV or F4V videos are always external), but not audio files, graphics, or text elements. So your idea of having all your sound files external to the main course SWF is not going to work with Cp. One reason for this is that Cp allows/requires you to time elements that appear on stage with audio files. So your slides and transitions need to be synchronised with the audio files. This would be extremely difficult to pull off reliably if you were changing the audio files all the time for different translation etc because they might be different durations.

It is possible to import dummy audio files into slides, copy over the audio files in their original import location when the final versions arrive, and then use the Captivate library to do a bulk update of the audio files in the project (as long as the file names have not changed). However, this would still require you to go through and synchronize any timed elements on the slides.

So yes, Captivate is a little more "complicated" but it also allows more creative freedom and requires less programming expertise.

Report · Oct 04, 2011

Additional information:

Mostly, we have 3-5 audios per slide/page. 10 is absolutely maximum.

And because we are talk about overall thousands of audio-files, i hopefully find a good way to keep them as external sources and Captivate embedd them just at the moment, when i have to produce a new release. (That is the main problem - sorry, my english language modules are still asleep after a long and busy weekend) And as i've learned, object-audio can't be used with external audio-files.

At the company, we've talked about the best process (theres is another huge project running and the guys - experienced people - are also new to captivate). At this moment, the prefered solution is to connect all audios, 4 by example. And then we can "Play/Pause" the audio at our needs. It is a little bit like stumbling blindfolded through heavy mist.

Another idea, brought up by me, was to multiply the slide so the first slide shows paragraph/pic/audio. After a click, next slide loads, exactly in the same state as the previous slides ends, next text/pic/animation and the next audio. But with that, i will end up with thousends of slides only because of the audio-handling.

Maybe it is a good idea to explain a really typically update process which may show what we like to see:

The modul is ready, delivered and the client is happy
After 6 months, there is a technical change within one part and the client need a single new audio
In reality in one special module, part of over 200 hours learning, after a year we've been instructed to record new versions for 35 of 80 audios ... in just one of somehundred modules

In captivate we try to avoid touching every single slide again.

At the moment i own just a standalone version of Captivate (5.5), the eLearning Suite has been ordered and arrives next week.

Tools we've used in the past (and until now due to clients requirements) without any problems ... dealing with audios 😉 :

Toolbook
Sumatra
CourseLab
Individual Flash Solutions
others

Report · Oct 04, 2011

Captivate allows you to have only one audio file for the main part of the slide. Any other audio files on the same slide have to be added as object-level audio that is timed to start when the object enters the timeline.

Once again, the issue is all about synchronisation. If you were intending these audio files to play one after the other, you either have to amalgamate them into one audio file for that slide, or else spread them over several consecutive slides. This best practice is more or less what you suggested in your second post.

Since you can externalise SWF files, you could theoretically have your audio introduced that way. But I think this would be more of a maintenance nightmare than any benefit in the long run.

It's a regular issue that a client wants some small change after a few months of running a course. In my experience, it only takes a few minutes to open the original project file, make the change, publish again, and upload. If none of the filenames change for the published output, you should be just able to upload the new content to the server and get on with life. Going to all the extra trouble of externalising thousands of audio files and trying to manage the multitude of links, just to save a few minutes of maintenance, doesn't sound like good practice to me.

Report · Oct 04, 2011

So Lilybiri and Rod, thanks a lot for your suggestions!

I've learned

, that i have to say goodbye to the long time used workflow. I'am absolutely honest, the audio maintenance with a tool like Toolbook is just a question of some moments, even with tons of audio files. Really. 🙂 But in every other case, working with ToolBook is painful, workarounds to left, workarounds to the right, trouble with stages, codex problems, a neverending story. And Sumatra (a Java-based development tool) has it's own problems ... a lot.

as i learn so much following this forum, and the# adobecaptivate and #elearning/#mlearnig Twitterati. For all this here and elsewhere: Thank you all very very much!

I'am shure that there comes a time, when i'am able to help others, because it seems that CP get the status of our new "Standard-Tool".