Solving Overlapping Audio in Storyline

Storyline’s great layers function allows for lots of information to be placed in click-though activities for your elearning. The main settings for each layer either allows for the layer to hide all other layers, or not. Hiding all other layers works well when your click-through activity only needs one piece of information displayed at a time, while turning this setting off allows all the information to build up cumulatively on the page. Either option can work depending on what your elearning needs.

However, if all the click-through items have audio and all of them need to be shown, things can get tricky. There is no issue if your click-through activity only shows one layer at a time when the learning is clicking on them – the automatic Storyline setting to hide all other layers also turns the audio on other layers off. If you need the visuals to remain but the audio to interrupt when a learner clicks on a new object, we have found that the simplest and most elegant way to solve this problem is with a variable.

First, you create a numeric variable for your slide, let’s call this Slide1Audio, and set the initial value to 0. Then you create these two triggers –

Set Slide1Audio equal to 1.00

When the timeline starts

Stop media Audio 1 – “Narration1”

When Slide1Audio changes

If Slide1Audio is not equal to 1.00

For each layer of information with audio you have, you give it a different number value, and set the audio to stop whenever the variable changes to a number not assigned to that layer. This makes for fewer programming triggers than if you were to add triggers for each audio file you had to stop, for each click-through button. You can even duplicate the one fully programmed layer and just change the variables for each of the new layers!

Keep reading this blog for more elearning programming tips, and check out our other articles on how to get the most out of Storyline – Storyline and Master Slides, eLearning Development - Articulate Storyline Sliders, and Drag and Drop Activities for eLearning in Storyline and Captivate.