Summary: Convert your audio files to FLV to create playbars.
Difficulty: Easy

 

As a qualified English teacher myself, I know the utility of allowing my students to play, pause and generally control an audio file they are listening to. This could be a listening comprehension exercise where they have to try and understand some basic elements, and being able to go back and listen to a critical point in the audio to check their understanding is obviously a welcome feature.

The same could be said for a speech or lecture. You might not choose to show the text of the speech and if the listener was distracted or simply did not understand what was said, they’ll want to be able to go back and listen again, without necessarily having to go back to the beginning.

Well all of that is fairly obvious. The problem arises when we try and insert audio into Engage. As many of you will have noticed, while Engage allows you to insert audio or even record your own voice directly into the interaction with just a press of a button, the user is not able to pause or control that audio file within the interaction. Check this example to see what I mean:

View Demo

There is no need to listen to the whole audio files of course. The point is that we can’t stop the audio at any point or go back and forth.

If the interaction is then embedded into Articulate Presenter, there is no problem since the Presenter player will control the audio in Engage. But if your Engage interaction is standalone ie. is published by itself either on the web or on CD, then the user has no way to control the audio. And if your Engage IS in Presenter and you wanted to hide your player controls in the Presenter player (for design purposes) then you are also stuck….

Unless you do something like this:

View Demo

There is now a controller for each audio file which the user can click on to listen and repeat as they choose.

How do we do it?

Well, as you will see, there is no option in Engage to create playback controls for audio files. But there is for FLV video files. When you insert an FLV video file, you have the option to include a playbar and for the file to start automatically or not. So the solution to our problem is to convert our audio files to Flash Video or FLV format.

Once they are in FLV format:

• Click on the Add Media button in one of your steps of your Engage interaction:

 

 

• Navigate to your selected FLV file and click OK:

 

 

• Select playbar and decide if you want the file to start automatically or not and click OK:

 

 

And that’s it. Your audio files will now have player controls attached to them.

Notes

Bear in mind that since you are using the Add Media function to add your audio, you will not necessarily be able to add images to go with your audio. It will depend on the interaction you are using. On the Process interaction, for example, you will only be able to have text on the steps you include the audio FLV file.

 

It is not very easy to find an audio to FLV converter, and when you do, you might find that Engage is not recognizing the correct length of the audio file.

I have checked a lot of programs to find those that worked well and I found only two, one which is no longer available but which I bought a few years back, and Replay Converter by Applian Technologies. It is possible that Adobe Flash will do the necessary but I didn’t find how to do this in Sorensen Squeeze, nor in much other software. Either the possibility to convert from audio to FLV did not exist, or if it did, the length of the file would appear wrong and the scrub bar would not work.

There is a free trial for Replay Converter which last indefinitely but is limited to 90 seconds audio conversion at a time. To convert your audio file in Replay Converter, add your WAV file (or mp3), and then choose to Convert to Video File (even though this is audio). Select “Add more video formats” in the drop-down menu and choose an FLV format (I chose the smallest file size 100 kps which is sufficient for audio only conversion). Then click on the Go button and your file is converted. You should find that Engage correctly recognizes the length of any file converted with Replay Converter.

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