Cannot Stop Audio from inserted swf animations

[Brian Rutherford]

I have a menu system project that I have created in Captivate which contains a series of lessons activated when the user select the lesson name button. Instead of inserting the lesson slides into this menu and simply creating a fork I have inserted the lessons swf file generated by Captivate. This makes developing this project a great deal easier as I only need one slide to 'play' the lesson instead of inserting dozens. Also 'swf' animations can be re-sized without any loss of quality which means I can fit these lessons in next to a menu or anywhere else I think of. These swf files contain audio narration.

When I publish the project the audio in the swf files starts to play in the background as soon as slide one appears. I have spent hours researching this and I am getting tired of reading posts where other users have had the same problem but no-one seems to able to come up with a solution. The best answer I've looked at was to:
1.start a new project in Flash
2. insert the folllowing Actionscript command into the first frame: stopAllSounds();
3. Publish the flash file.
4. Insert it into the first slide of the Captivate project. The Actionscript gets played and hey presto - the background audio stops.
I tried placing it in the first slide. It didn't work. I tried placing it on every slide. Well, it sort of worked. Whenever the slide changed the audio stopped...for about 30 secs then kicked in again. I've attached the stopAllSounds.swf file to this discussion if anyone else wants to try this.

Surely it must be possible to insert captivate-generated swf files into a captivate project? Does anyone have a solution to this?
regards
Brian Rutherford

[Brian Rutherford]

Well, I must say the lack of any response is extremely disheartening. Never mind. Here are my conclusions, not all of which youre going to like.

Captivate 3: When you insert swf created in captivate into a captivate swf the audio problem is different. When you play the presentation its fine. No sounds creeping in. Go to the slide with the embedded swf and it plays fine, with the audio that is part of the embedded swf. When you navigate away from this slide the audio keeps playing.

Solution: insert a swf created by a flash editor. The swf should have one command

stopAllSounds();

place the swf on any slide that you might navigate to after viewing the slide with the inserted captivate swf. This will do exactly as it says and kill the audio.

Captivate 4: The problem here is far more severe. If you insert a captivate-created swf with audio into a captivate 4 slide then following will occur:

Viewing using IE7/8- the presentation works fine- No problems.

Viewing using any other browser (firefox etc) - the audio starts up straight away in slide one. Its doesn't matter that the inserted swf is on slide 200 it starts up anyway. If you navigate to the slide with the inserted swf ( lets say slide 200) it starts up again and you have two playing at the same time.

Solution: There seems to be no solution to this. I discovered that an amended version of the stopallsounds actionscript file does go some way to a solution as a starting point. If you add the command 'nextFrame();' to the stopallsounds file and place this file at the start of the presentation that it does what it says. It will stop all sounds..navigate to the next slide, stop the playhead on the flash player and ....well thats it. No sound sure, but the whole thing grinds to a halt. I tried adding another actionscript workaround with the command 'play();' later on in the second slide. I was hoping that once the audio had been killed that I could start up the presentation again minus the sound. Can you guess what happened? Yup , as soon as it hit the play command it was back to playing all the audio in the inserted swf.

My solution. I have abandoned Captivate 4 and gone back to version 3

Quite a lot of you will still be using earlier versions of Captivate. Be wary of upgrading. Its certainly feasible to re-install Captivate 3 but Adobes licensing software tends to take over your computer and how it would take to you going back to the captivate 3 license is anyones guess.

[Jan Machaj]

Hi Brian,
i am using Captivate 3 and I have the same problem as you described. When I import .swf created in Flash CS4 and the publish movie, first soud is playing twice. What is interesting it is happenig only first time I load movie from web. On the second load is everythikg OK. You are describing the same problem, but with captivate 4. What is the source of your .swf? Maybe I can send you mine .swf and you will try to import it into yaour capt. 3. If it will be OK, than is problem in my installation. Or do you have any suggestions how to work this problem out?
I have also the second problem you mentioned - sound is playing again after last .swf file. I will try stopAllSounds() command to solve this. Thanx for that.

Jan

[Brian Rutherford]

Jan, by all means send me your swf and I'll try it on my project. You can send it to:

brian.rutherford'at'eyecademy.com

When I first came across this problem all of the swf's I used were generated from the same install of Captivate4. I removed captivate4 and re-installed captivate3. I re-created the swf files from scratch in Captivate3 (which was very, very irritating to say the least), inserted them and then used the 'stopAllSounds()' solution to prevent any sound bleedover as I navigated away to other slides. This worked perfectly or at least as perfectly as a workaround can. If you want me to send you the stopAllSounds().swf I'd be happy to save you some time,

Cheers
Brian

[Todd Haynes]

Brian, I hate to have a spam-ish reply, but I built a product for Captivate just for this purpose. It's called the Launch Pad, and what it does is present via HTML, CSS, JavaScript a menu in a web page. Clicking the Launch Pad buttons displays multiple Captivate movies (.swfs) in the web page. It comes with 4 menu layouts, and if you can edit basic HTML and CSS, you can redesign the page to meet any of your specific branding/design requirements. Info is at my website Thx, Todd.