One more thing worth considering is the possibility of volume variations between your audio files. While Articulate allows you to normalize your audio upon publishing, I’ve learned that normalizing doesn’t really do everything you might want (or expect) it to.

There is another tool (free!) worth considering before importing your narration audio into Articulate, called The Levelator.

Details on The Levelator and how I use it in my Articulate workflow here: http://www.equixotic.com/2008/02/02/improve-your-elearning-narration-audio-with-the-levelator/

Chris, I agree…The Levelator is indeed a simple, great and free way to enhance your audio files. BTW, it does support drag-and-drop batch processing…at least in WinXP.

Hey Phil, I realized The Levelator will batch process files (it works on the Mac version too) but my question is this: can The Levelator do its magic across multiple files? Or will doing so result in a different “reference point” for each individual file, resulting in inconsistent levels across the multiple files?

Pardon my complete lack of audio technical expertise – my understanding was that The Levelator can’t really do its thing effectively over multiple files, but that conclusion may be based on misinformation I found in various online forums. Yes, Google in the hands of a newbie can be a dangerous thing.

It would be nice to know if it can be effectively used across multiple files – it would save me the additional export/import step.

Chris, glad you got the batching to work on the Mac. No worries about tech expertise…we’re all here to learn

Although, I am not a regular user (I use Adobe Audition for my compression/normalization chores), I can tell you that I gave The Levelator a good workover a while back when a colleague wanted to recommend it to other departments. I just ran another batch of 40 raw audio files from a single session thru the Levelator, and witnessed a consistent volume level (listening and looking at the waveform) throughout.

Keep in mind that audio compression/limiting–one of the effects that Levelator applies–reduces the range of volume peaks and valleys for a file. This reduced range–resulting in virtually the same peak or “reference point” for all files–allows for much more consistent volume levels across files when normalization is applied afterwards.

Because The Levelator performs compression, limiting and normalization in one pass, and no options can be tweaked in the app, the exact same settings are applied to each file. This should result in consistent volume.

Of course, if you bring in files that were recorded differently (different mic/voice/room etc.), your mileage may vary.

Overall, the app does a nice job, is very efficient and best of all, free!

I hope that info helps and makes some sense.

Phil (AKA Spectre)

I am having trouble with the import audio feature. The dialog box is not coming up when I select the menu option “Import Audio.” I have tried resaving my ppt as a different file name and restarting my computer. Any advice?

Suz

[...] Importing Audio into Presenter [...]

I have an existing PowerPoint presentation with embedded .wav files. I thought I could sync the audio to these existing embedded files. I do not have the original files. Any recommendations? Is there a way to sync audio that is already embedded in PowerPoint using Articulate?

Hi Candice- Here’s a Knowledge Base entry that should help.

You can also try saving your PowerPoint file as a Web page (.html), which should extract the .WAV file for you to import via the Articulate menu.

Is there a simple way for me to achieve consistent volume among various audio clips and video? I.e. determine video’s sound level and set other audio-only files to the same level?

Here are a couple of articles which should give you some ideas:
http://www.articulate.com/blog/articulate-101-how-to-make-the-most-of-your-recorded-audio/
http://www.articulate.com/forums/34585-post3.html

Is there any way to view a list of audio files imported into a project?

Hi Tracy- What version of Presenter are you using? If you’re using Presenter ’09, you can export audio via Articulate -> Audio Editor -> (Articulate Logo) -> Export.

Actually, what I’d like to do is take all the mappings in the Audio import window and put them out to an Excel file (or something similar). Occasionally, we lose the audio mappings, and the files are named in such a way that we have to map each slide to an audio file. It would make relinking the audio so much easier. Does Articulate do that?

Hi Tracy- It sounds like you’re not using Presenter ’09 since when you export from it, the file names are named to match the slide numbers.

For Presenter 4 and 5, see this Knowledge Base entry.

Is that what you were looking for?

Hi,

I use Articulate Presenter 5.1.382. An outside person narrates our slides. The narrator has provided MP3 files in the past and they worked without problem, but the MP3 will not process properly now in Presenter, so the narrator provided the files also as WAV. Fyi,the MP3 files he provided for Engage were inserted without a problem, and I have MP3 Gain software to adjust the volume. However, Presenter will not accept the MP3 files properly and when the WAV files are imported, I cannot change the volume. I have unchecked “read only” on the file properties. Could you advise, please?

The WAV settings follow the recommendations:
Bit rate: 16 bit
Sampling rate: 44 KHZ
Encoding: PCM
Format: WAV

Thanks.

Colleen

Hi Colleen. For technical assistance please submit a case:
http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/

The link to Dave M’s blog should be updated to: http://www.mozealous.com/?p=31

Thanks for pointing this out, Will. I’ve updated the link in the post.