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Gabe Anderson

Word of Mouth is the Articulate blog, hosted by Director of Customer Support Gabe Anderson.

Gabe is passionate about e-learning, and has more than a decade of Web publishing and software support experience.

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Audio Editing

Thursday, December 16th, 2004 by gabe

8 Comments


This article applies to Articulate Presenter 4. See what’s new in Articulate Presenter 5!

AudacityWebLogo100.jpg Articulate Presenter includes a built-in feature to record your own narration (Articulate -> Record Narration). This is our recommended approach for most users, which will result in high-quality audio that’s optimized for speech.

Articulate Presenter also has the ability to import existing .WAV and .MP3 files, though we suggest the former for best results. If you’re importing .MP3 files, don’t forget to keep these guidelines in mind, since Flash has certain limitations about settings. Also, not all .MP3 files are created equally, so in rare cases, even though you may be using one of the Flash-supported settings, you may still experience difficulty with your .MP3s.

soundforge.jpg Enter third-party editing software, which comes in handy not only for decoding your .MP3 files to .WAV, but also for creating more advanced audio files that you can import via Articulate Presenter into your e-learning course or presentation. Perhaps you want to clean up your speech track or mix some background music in with your speech (one track per slide). Or perhaps you just want to adjust the levels of audio you or your contractor have recorded.

For basic/beginner audio editing, we recommend Audacity, which is a free editor.

For more advanced/professional-level audio editing, we recommend SoundForge.

Whatever tool you choose, you’ll have the best results by exporting a .WAV file then importing via Articulate Presenter to the corresponding slide.

Posted in Articulate Presenter

8 Responses to “Audio Editing”

I would also recommend Goldwave for audio editing.

Is there any way of changing audio levels when you publish in presenter? I have some videos and audio in there, but the volume level varies.

Tracy  |  Posted at 04:39 am on August 3rd, 2007 |  #

Hi Tracy- Have you tried enabling the option “Optimize audio volume” in Articulate -> Library and Options -> Other? Also, if your video and imported/recorded audio are coming from two sources, that may be a challenge. There’s been lots of discussion about audio issues in our forums, so you might want to check there, too.

gabe  |  Posted at 03:30 pm on August 7th, 2007 |  #

I’m trying out the newest version of Articulate Pro and I can’t seem to get a seamless presentation no matter what I do to edit the wave file so that the voice and background music transition smoothly from slide to slide. The audio was recorded in a professional sound studio and optimized using Sound Forge Pro. The wave file was sliced into 21 slide segments and transfered using the Articulate Import Audio feature. After publishing and playing back the presentation, the audio gaps between slides. I try and take the gaps out using the Articulate Timline Audio Editor and they just keep coming back. Any suggestions?

Phil  |  Posted at 04:01 pm on October 2nd, 2007 |  #

Phil- Are you using the background audio feature for your background music? That should provide a seamless transition between slides.

gabe  |  Posted at 09:57 am on October 8th, 2007 |  #

I need to have audio for my elearning or my portfolio in my HR access for work

KYLE G MATHESON  |  Posted at 03:58 am on January 18th, 2008 |  #

Hi Kyle- I’m not sure what you’re asking, but are you recording audio via Articulate -> Record Narration? If you’re just trying to add audio, that’s one method — or you could import audio into your elearning course.

You might want to start with the Articulate Presenter 5 Help Documentation.

gabe  |  Posted at 10:57 am on January 18th, 2008 |  #

I had professional voiceover done for an e-learning programme using articulate engage, it is in.WAV format. When I tried to import I got an error message which said the following

ACM Driver error

What can I do about this?

James Ahearne  |  Posted at 05:07 pm on February 7th, 2008 |  #

I imported background music for the first slide of a presentation. I had to re-record the narration first for that slide because I had accidently erased it when attempting to import music (part of the learning curve). Now, when I play the presentation, the first slide sounds good with narration and background music but the volume of the narration on the remaining slides is lower. Is there any way to fix that (i.e., raise the volume) without re-recording the entire presentation?

bert  |  Posted at 03:12 pm on May 28th, 2008 |  #

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