Adobe Captivate 5: Make Quick Work Out of Adding Audio to a Project

Adding audio to your Captivate project is one of the best ways to increase the effectiveness of the lesson. When the time comes to add audio, you have a couple of different options. For instance, if you want to add audio to the project slide, you would choose Audio > Import to > Slide. If you would like to attach audio to an object on a slide, you would first select the object and choose Audio > Import to > Object. Either way, the Import audio dialog box opens and you would browse to the appropriate audio file (Captivate allows you to import either WAV or MP3 file formats) and open the file. 

The steps above are simple, but the process becomes laborious if you intend to use several audio clips in a project. If your project consisted of 100 slides and hundreds of objects, you would be looking at thousands of clicks. Again, not difficult stuff but certainly time-consuming.

Considering that this is the holiday season, I'd like to give a gift… the gift of time. You can speed up the audio import process dramatically by following these steps.

1. Show the Library (via the Window menu).

    

2. On the Library, click the Import tool.
    
   
    
3. Browse to the folder containing the audio clips you intend to use in the Captivate project. Select some or all of the files and open them.

   

   

   On the import project has completed, you'll notice that all of the audio clips appear in the Audio folder on the Library.

    

4. The final step… and the one that's going to save you all the time, is to drag the audio clips from the Library and directly onto slide objects. For instance, if you want to add a clip to the slide, drag the audio clip directly on top of the slide on the Filmstrip. To add an audio clip to a slide object, drag the clip directly on top of the slide's object.

   And that's it. With the time you have just saved, get on out there and get that holiday shopping done (or started).