Forum Discussion
Audio plays in timeline but not during preview
This is my first time working with audio in Storyline, though I've done plenty of projects without audio. I'm trying to add just a basic click sound when learners click a button. The triggers all look correct me: "When the user clicks Start button play audio 1." But when I preview the project, I don't hear anything. I tried publishing to Rise and it doesn't play the audio there either.
The audio plays fine from the timeline, and I have the volume controls turned on in the player. They are one second long mp3 files. What might be preventing the sound effects from playing?
Hi Carolyn, are you able to share a stripped down example of this so i can take a look for you?
I've attached the whole project, since it is something that I'm just making for practice.
I applied a sound effect to all the navigation buttons - continue, left, right, and home. But the sound still doesn't play during preview.
Hi Carolyn, the issue you are finding with this is, because your trigger is going to another slide, the navigation is taking place before the audio has chance to play.
I also noticed, the the Play audio trigger was after Jump to slide. Swapping these didn't have any impact unfortunately.
I think it's going to be quite an arduous task to set this up so that the audio plays and then navigates. Basically, you would need to give the audio opportunity to play, and then have the navigation trigger on media complete.
This is fine on the first slide, as there is navigation in only one direction, but for other slides it is more complex.
What I have done on slide 1.2 is given all of the navigation buttons an extra state "selected". I then placed the buttons into a button set by selecting all of those buttons, right click and select Button Set (I had to modify your home button so it wasn't a group to do this). Adding the buttons to a set means only one at time can be in the "selected" state. We can then use that to determine where to navigate to when the audio has finished playing.
See the attached file for an implementation example.
Thanks, Sam! That makes total sense!
I recreated your edits in the attached file, along with some sound effects for individual actions on the slides. I can hear the sound effects now, but the navigation doesn't always happen like it is supposed to.
When I previewed it, I could click around the room by using the left arrow button repeatedly. When I completed the circle, I started clicking around with the right button and it randomly starts going to the wrong slide. I checked the interactions and everything seemed to be correct so I tried the preview again. This time I could click around successfully by clicking the right arrow repeatedly, and it only went wonky when I started using the left arrow.
I don't see any triggers that would cause the buttons to work sometimes but not others.
I have experimented with MANY different solutions for adding simple 'click' sound effects to my buttons and they have all ended up being unreliable and time consuming. I would love to see this functionality improved upon since UI sound effects are commonplace today.
There seem to be two main issues I run into:
- The Storyline audio player has difficulty playing very short clips, so I frequently need to add small instances of silence at the beginning for the program to properly register and play the audio.
- Each and every way to trigger audio from a button click comes with tradeoffs and drawbacks.
Down State - only works while the button is down, so if the user clicks/taps and releases to quickly you hear no sound
Selected/Visited State - only plays audio one time, unless complex resetting of the state is done, which is extremely time consuming and unreliable. Also interrupted by navigation.
Navigation button - when using the 'play media' trigger, if the button is also used for navigation to a new slide, the audio is interrupted, even with proper ordering of triggers (as you note above).
Master Slide - placing the audio on the master slide and triggering with a variable still gets interrupted by slide navigation and is not reliable.
Possible Solutions:
- Instances of audio for buttons would need to persist throughout the project similar to how the new Background Audio functions independently of navigation.
- The audio player would need to be able to handle extremely short clips of 0-0.1 seconds in order for the audio to feel 'instant' and responsive when clicking.
- Possibly adding a new state or new field for 'button audio' when creating clickable objects that is persistent and plays across all states and navigation while retaining existing functionality of current states.
