The Logical Blog by IconLogic: Adobe Captivate: Lost a Syllable of Audio? Here's a Tip That'll Get It Back

Adobe Captivate: Lost a Syllable of Audio? Here's a Tip That'll Get It Back

When adding audio to your Captivate project, you may be surprised to learn that you can actually attach audio to any of the following:

The Project (Audio > Background Audio)
The Slide (Audio > Import)
Or Slide Objects (show the Properties of an object, and use the Audio tab)

If you are adding narration to your project, I recommend audio directly to the slide instead of an object on a slide. Once you do, the audio will appear on the Timeline as a waveform.

Waveform on the Timeline

Why should you attach audio clips to the slide instead of slide objects? Simply put, if you keep the number of slide objects to a minimum (we try not to put more than one text caption and a click box or button on a slide), you'll find that you will speed up the production process. In addition, adding the audio to the slide tends to be faster than having to show the properties of a slide object and then attaching the audio to the object.

Over the years, I've added hundreds, if not thousands, of audio clips to Captivate projects. When previewing the project, the audio typically played wonderfully. However, from time to time the first one-tenth of a second of audio would get cut off from the published version of the project.

Re-importing the audio would not fix the problem. Re-recording the audio would not fix the problem. Cursing didn't seem to help.

We stumbled across a simple workaround that solved the problem:

Open a slide that contains audio attached to the slide (as mentioned above, you'll see a waveform on the Timeline if you've attached audio to a slide)
On the Timeline, drag the audio waveform right so that the audio starts approximately 1/2 of a second after the slide starts

And that's it. When the slide appears in the published version of your project, the 1/2 second delay will not be noticeable to your users and will ensure that the first second of audio isn't lost (cut off) as the slide is appearing onscreen.