Timing Sound in Adobe Captivate
As an addition to last week’s article on Timing objects in Adobe Captivate, I wanted to call attention to a slight flaw in Captivate’s “Pause” function for interactive objects. This might help you when programming an interaction in your elearning that requires learner input before continuing, if there’s audio involved.
Originally, this slide contained audio that was all in the same audio clip at the bottom of the timeline, where once the learner had typed something into the Text Entry Box and clicked Submit, the slide would continue and play the feedback audio. However, I discovered that although the timeline would pause for the purposes of new objects appearing on the slide after the pause point, the audio would continue playing regardless!
To solve this issue, I cut the audio into two clips – the audio before the pause and the feedback audio after. Then I replaced the original audio on the slide with the clip of the question, and attached the feedback audio to the new object SmartShape_367. This was just a random shape that wouldn’t be visible on screen, and timed to begin just after the pause. This way, the audio would stop and restart correctly before and after the learner filled in the text entry.
Just remember that if you create an interaction like this in your Captivate elearning, make sure you know how long the second audio clip is to be able to lengthen the slide timeline appropriately. Since the audio is tied to an object, the object’s timeline can still be adjusted to any length, so make sure it doesn’t get cut off early.
Let us know if you have a different workaround for such Captivate issues, or check out our other articles on elearning authoring tool workarounds!
