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April 25, 2008
Question

Play / Pause Button and audio

  • April 25, 2008
  • 2 replies
  • 714 views
Several people - including myself - have had problems with the Play/Pause button in a playbar not stopping audio. The Play/Pause button stops the slide, but the audio continues. Although I don't have a solution, I have pinpointed at least one cause of the problem and wanted to share it with everyone. There have been posts about this issue in the past, but the explanation has larger implications than what was being discussed in those threads, so I started a new thread.

In my case at least, the problem is tied to a button on the slide. I have narration audio on each slide. My audio narrations are usually about 20 seconds in length. On each slide, I use a button labeled Continue that pauses the slide until clicked. On click, the button navigates the learner to the next slide. The button comes in after about 7 seconds and is set to Pause after 1 second. The Stop Slide Audio option for the button is turned off.

The desired end result is that when the learner comes into the slide, the audio narration starts, after 7 seconds the Continue button appears and the slide pauses while the audio continues playing. If the learner does not want to listen to all of the audio, he or she can click the Continue button to go to the Next screen.

If the learner never touches the Play/Pause button in the playbar, everything works exactly as expected. However, if the learner uses the Play/Pause button to pause the presentation, we get some unexpected results:

Before the 7th second (when our Continue button appears), the Play/Pause button works as expected. Everything pauses and restarts as you would expect.

Once the slide reaches the 7th second, the Continue button appears, the slide pauses and the audio continues, as we expect, BUT clicking the Play/Pause button does not pause the audio. The audio will keep playing until we click the Play/Pause button two more times. The first click on the Play/Pause button actually restarts the slide from the paused state (because the Continue button had paused the slide) and so the slide and the audio keep playing. I can see this because the progress bar starts moving again.

The Continue button paused the slide, and the Play/Pause button considers the presentation paused (even though the button graphic does not change to indicate the paused state). So now we have a dilemma - the slide is paused (by the Continue button) but the audio is playing. The Play/Pause button is thinking the overall presentation is paused, even though the audio is stil playing. If you click the Play/Pause button at this point, you expect the audio to pause, but the Play/Pause button is acutally restarting the presentation and so the audio continues. Its a Catch-22.

A side effect of this behavior is that if you pause your presentation with a button or a click box to require the learner to perform an interaction on the screen, the learner can bypass the required interaction by simply clicking the Play/Pause button in the playbar a couple of times.

Hope this helps someone having pause issues.

Regards,

Chris
    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    April 28, 2008
    Thanks Matt. I will look into that - I saw a post that discusses some pre-built widgets and I will check those out too. Thanks!

    Regards,

    Chris
    Inspiring
    April 25, 2008
    Hi Chris,

    Most of the content I create is deployed through a LMS which has its own flash based controls used to navigate through the content.

    This means that i do not use any of the captivate toolbar controls, but rather build the navigation buttons into the captivate screen itself.

    This has elliminated the issues you are discussing and seems to result in a more polished end result . . . something to consider perhaps?

    Cheers,

    Matt.