Narration    Audio is missing or lost in published Presenter ‘09 presentation

If you are working in Presenter ‘09 and notice your audio disappears, there are several possible reasons this issue can occur

The PPTA file and why it’s important

All audio in Presenter is stored in your PPTA file. This file resides in the same location as your PowerPoint file and is named the same as your PowerPoint file. The PPTA file is a file format which stores everything you add to your presentation through the Articulate menu. This includes Flash movies, web objects, logos, playlists, presenters, attachments, audio, etc… If the connection between the PPTA file and your PowerPoint file is broken, you will lose your audio. Therefore, it is important that you understand how best to manage your files and how to reconnect a PPTA file to the PowerPoint file if the connection is broken.

Use the Send to Articulate Presenter Package function to easily share or backup projects

The easiest way to share a presenter project with another user, and ensure that the other user has all the resources necessary to work on a presentation is to use the Send to Articulate Presenter Package function. This will package your PowerPoint presentation, Presenter, Engage and Quizmaker files so that they can be edited on another computer, or backed-up for archive.

How did the <presentation>-old.ppta file get there?

Presenter now creates a backup PPTA file whose name will be <presentation>-old.ppta if the following is true:

1. If a user does a “Save as” and saves over an existing PowerPoint file with a PPTA file. Whenever a user does a Save as, Presenter will also copy the PPTA file to the Save as Location. This can cause a conflict if there is already a PPTA file in that location. Rather than overwriting the file, Presenter renames the file to <presentation>-old.ppta.
2. If Presenter upgrades a project from Presenter 5 and a PPTA file already exists in that location. If a PPTA file already exists, Presenter will change the name of the file to <presentation>-old.ppta and create a new one.
3. If you have a PPT (2003 or earlier) and PPTX (2007) file in the same folder with the same name. If you have a PPT and PPTX file in the same folder withe the same name, Presenter will want to name the PPTA file the same regardless of which file you are working on. If there already is a PPTA file in the folder that is not associated with the PowerPoint file you open, Presenter will change the name of the file to <presentation>-old.ppta and create a new one for the opened PowerPoint file.
4. A user moves a file outside of PowerPoint, and there is a PPTA with the same name as the PowerPoint file in the target directory. If Presenter detects a project is moved outside of PowerPoint, it will copy over the PPTA to the current directory (provided you have write permissions to that directory). If there is an existing PPTA file in that location, Presenter will change the name of the file to <presentation>-old.ppta and create a new one.

Restoring the connection between the <presentation>-old.ppta file and your PowerPoint file

In the event that a <presentation>-old.ppta file is created which still contains your audio, you can easily reconnect it with the PowerPoint file.

1. You can tell if the <presentation>-old.ppta file contains your audio because it should be significantly larger than your current PPTA file.
2. If your PowerPoint presentation’s name is still the same, you would simply need to remove the -old from the PPTA name and make sure that the PPTA file resides in the same directory as that of the PowerPoint file. This will restore the connection between the PPTA file and your PowerPoint file.
3. If you changed the name of the PowerPoint file you would simply need to update the <presentation>-old.ppta file name to match the PowerPoint name.

My audio is not in an old PPTA file because I did not have Update 4 installed

If you are unable to reconnect the PowerPoint file with the original PPTA file, you may be able to locate the audio by doing the following:

1. Open a folder in Windows Explorer.
2. Type %appdata%/Articulate/Presenter/Project in the address bar of the window and click Enter.
3. Locate the log file that corresponds with your project and open it.
4. At the top of the file locate the PackProject path with the long folder name in the same location as the log file. Like this: PackProject: C:/Users/Justin Wilcox/AppData/Roaming/Articulate/Presenter/Project/2B733B6D-E688-4CC5-9BA3-BC94219D8990
5. Open that folder.
6. Locate the narration folder.
7. In the narration folder would be your audio files and an ae.ini file.
8. You can determine what audio file corresponds with what slide by opening the ae.ini file in Notepad and looking for the following information:

   [1]
   SlideTitle=Your Slide Title
   SlideTrack=track264.wav
   Duration=2.534
   ClickMarkerTimes=
   AutoMarkerTimes=

Once you have determined what audio file corresponds with what slide you can then reimport the audio via Articulate -> Import Audio. You can even import multiple audio files at the same time. Articulate recommends importing no more than 20 files at a time to ensure a smooth process.

If none of these steps resolve your issue, please contact Support for further assistance.

Directory Structure

It is recommended that you do not save your PowerPoint presentation (PPT or PPTX) in a folder with the exact same name as the PowerPoint file.

Saving a PowerPoint presentation in a folder with the exact same name as the PowerPoint file does not cause loss of audio.  However, depending on the location where you choose to publish your presentation, you may lose Articulate resources (including audio) with this directory structure.  To avoid this possibility, it is best that the folder in which a presentation is saved not have the same name as the PowerPoint file within it.