Serious audio problems in Presenter 7

[jonturkle]

I am posting this for anyone who may be seeing the fallout of the new way Presenters handles audio to see if anyone else is having these issues

After months of testing I have discovered that (using either Power Point 2003 or Power Point 2007) Presenter 7.0.2 will not delete or add audio files once the presentation has been recorded. Seemingly unlike Presenter 6, with Presenter 7 if you delete audio embedded power point slide the audio `files for those slides are never deleted from of the audio folder. If you move of copy audio from one slid to the next no new slide audio file is created - Rather Presenter 7 only refers to the original audio file.

What does that mean to you the author? Any audio you cut or copy one slide to another is not actually displaying or using that file, even though the audio editor would lead you to believe that. Any editing of or any audio volume changes now seems to add unrecoverable audio artifacts in the audio editor that, given enough edits, can make your audio unintelligible. Move the slide markers around in the audio editor and watch the playback synchronization with the audio editor drift out of sync for no apparent reason. Make enough edits and Power Point will crash generating a severe error message identifying the Presenter plug-in as the cause and the recommendation to uninstall Presenter..

Audio recording through presenter: Create a live audio recording in a slide, pause the recording momentarily and then start recording again. You will only get audio after the pause was made.

In several example of presenter 6 presentations migrated to Presenter 7 we have seen all manner of strange behavior including presentations that publish with missing slide audio to presentations which corrupt when attempts are made to re-open the Power Point file. The same work flow carried out on the Presenter 6 version has none seen of these issues. One might easily imagine this is a system problem, but we have experienced these problems on multiple computers with multiple authors.

Has anyone else experienced these issues in Presenter 7?

[Guest]

Hi Jonturkle, I am having exactly the same issue with the Pause recording "Audio recording through presenter: Create a live audio recording in a slide, pause the recording momentarily and then start recording again. You will only get audio after the pause was made."

and your other issue that you experienced below explains what was happening on my pc, but I just couldn't understand why. Very well explained.

I am on a Windows PC, have XP (Svc Pk2). I have done all types of testing with presenter 7, uninstalled, reinstalled, tested, issue happened still, then applied the 2 patches 7.01 firs - tested, same issue, then applied
7.02, tested, the same issue is still happnening. Oh I tested on both my machines same issue.

I have been on the phone to the help desk for about an hour, uninstalling and reinstaling, and rebooting again, the exact same issue occurred again. I'm just about to be transferred to a senior technician so hopefully there will be a resolution at some point.

What PC build are you guys using.

[jonturkle]

Hi Lara101:
One additional thing I noticed is that the visual representation of the audio editor (with regard to the correct representation of audio animation and slide points within the audio) is not accurate depending on the zoom amount on the editor. The more of the time you display the less accurate the representation. For example, you can hear audio after the wave form shows the audio being completed. Zoom in on the timeline and the representation changes and is accurate. At lease there is a workaround. If you do not zoom in your animations and slide changes will not occur where you expect them.

[jonturkle]

lara: In answer to your quesrion about our system, we are using Windows XP, Power Point 2007 and Presenter 7.02

Good luck with support. I have tried logging tthis as a bug since June.
Let me know if you made any headway.

[Guest]

Yes, I have noticed too the audio wav file looks very strange and very flat. When you zoom in you don't see much differentiation in the pitch of the voice etc. I have just got off the phone, someone will hopefully get back to me. I have alerted the support this Chat thread. Unfortunately still no resolution yet 😞

[Kev_UCLan]

Hi folks, yes we are also experiencing the problem with live recording, the pause feature causes all previous recording on the slide to be lost. I will also report this to the engineering team.
Thanks
Kevan

[HelvetiaWV]

I have had Presenter fail several times when I clicked an audio feature, usuall edit. After this, PPT will give me a message saying that the add-in has serious problems and wanting to disable it. Once, my audio was corrupted causing me to move back to an earlier version and losing a good bit of work.

I did a show in the highest resolution, specified to download the entire slide before showing, and put it on a CD. Apparently the system would wait until all of the visual was loaded before starting the display but the beginning of the narration for each slide would be lost. Perhaps the start of the audio and video are separated?

[Kev_UCLan]

Hi all, the record/pause issue has been reported as bug number #1910138 and is stated to get fixed in the next release.

Ta
Kev

[jonturkle]

unintentional reply

[jonturkle]

Yes, this has been reported prviously. But you might want to ask them when that release is going to happen - if they willgive you an answer. Last I heard Adobe was not intending to make another Presenter fix until July!

[Rekha_Mohanty]

Hi,

For a certain project that I am currently working on, I used a brand new ppt deck. I had a set of source ppt files and copied them to a location before starting work on them. But the problem arose when I tried to do edits or add a new slide, or edit a voice file, or add a new voice file……in short Adobe Presenter did not permit any editing. This means that the entire audio/animation synching needed to be worked on from scratch. This problem persisted since the beginning of the audio synching phase.

I have tried the entire process on different systems, with different PowerPoint versions (Office 2003 and Office 2007). I worked on my laptop (that has Office 2007) as well to see if it could be a version issue. I also uninstalled and reinstalled MS Office 2003 today to see if it could be an issue with PowerPoint that could get sorted with reinstallation. But nothing worked!!

Considering that many of you may be working with Presenter, I thought it might help to share what I have experienced and what I think may work..

• Make sure to key any extra slides that you may need and their titles at the start.
• Since Presenter generates single audio files for each slide, it seems that it has a problem recognizing audio files that you try to link later. Most often, it throws an error.
• Do all edits and animations as required on the ppts at the very beginning, before synching the animations and audio…..Presenter very often throws up an error to save an edited file.
• Also, I have found that if you have a certain slide that has an error in the audio and try to replace the re-recorded file and resynch the slide, the media.ppcx file disappears. (In some cases alone, it may not)
• Regarding synching animation and audio, work as if first is final. Consider that audio and animation synching will be a one time activity and one of the last that you will undertake….

Does anyone have a solution? Need help....

[Big_Muck]

Given that in any professional e-learning development situation, editing and updates to individual slides/audio files are a given, it has been very frustrating for us when the media.ppcx files can magically dissapear without warning at anytime - which means all of the files have to be re-loaded and re-synched. If this is not resolved soon, we may have to look for alternatives, as we produced 100's of these each year and many require annual updating to specific segments.

[mrock66]

I'm hoping the next update for Presenter is coming out in a week or two (give or take)  I'll see if i can get an exact date for you all.

Matt

[Guest]

An update would be fantastic although I was told by the Adobe technical support team that no further updates were planned.......and to look for a workaround for the problems...it's so frsustrating especially when we were intending to use Adobe Presenter to produce a set of e learning only for the product not to work.  I am just on my 5th attempt of re-synching the audio after having to re-inport the audio 3 times and completely abandoning our original idea of having audio within the quiz manager.  Adobe definitely needs to do some updates as it appears that if no changes are made to the current product then the only other option is to look for alternative products!

[Guest]

also regarding the pause function we were told at the outset that this didn't work and that we would need to keep re-recording until we were eventually happy with a slide..???

[mrock66]

I'm sorry that's the answer you got from support but it's not accurate

I know for a fact 7.05 is coming out, hopefully in the next week or so, but i have no exact date yet(still looking for one)

This issue: When recording audio on a slide and using pause and resume functionality all audio before the last pause is lost.

Is apparently fixed, so hopefully you can hold out a bit longer.

There are quite a few fixes coming out, so hopefully it addresses all the problems addressed in this thread.

Matt Rock

[TLTC-2]

Any chance that the update will be coming this first week  in August? We have faculty who need to move ahead with their work but we can't recommend Presenter 7 until we see that these audio issues have been fixed.

Thanks,

Kathryn Propst

Teaching and Learning Technologies Centers

Indiana University

[Guest]

The latest update I have is 7.0.2, this update was meant to address a number of the issues that I was experiencing such as intermittent audio when recording, the pause function, audio being deleted when editing, audio being delted when accessing quiz manager.....I don't know if I hold out much hope for the new updates actually doing anything..

[mrock66]

Do you still have a case number i can look at?  I'm sure we can get confirmation on the bugs that you are having issues with.

Besides losing all audio when editing, what is/are your other main issues stopping you from being productive?

[Guest]

Hi

That would be great, this has been ongoing since the beginning of the year and I have just had to muddle through and keep repeating what I have done.

My case number is 181050064

The main issues I am having are as follows:

I recently had Adobe presenter installed on my windows XP machine.  Adobe presenter is set up to run through PowerPoint 2003.

I recorded all of the audio as mp3 files straight onto my machine (although there were a few issues such as intermittent sound).  When I have accessed the quiz manager section to record some audio there, it crashed my machine and removed all of the audio from the whole presentation (luckily I had the audio files saved somewhere else!!).  I then went back into the presentation and tried re-importing all of the audio back in.  Again, when I accessed the quiz manager the same thing happened again....

I have spoken to Adobe and they said that it is down to the compatibility of Adobe Presenter/PowerPoint and that I should find a workaround....

The above has happened on several occasions.  Every time Adobe crashes it removes all of the Audio files from the presentation and on number of occasions has also completely  deleted the files along with the media file which I have then had to get IT at work to restore.  We have had issues with the recording, when we record directly onto the machine through Adobe the sound is really intermittent and at the time of the recording we are often having to play back what we have recorded to check that it is ok and then also re-record until it seems that Adobe picks up of all the audio correctly.  I have spoken to Adobe twice have had loads of live chats and also several cases relating to this.....

I also submitted the below as my original problem:

Since we have had the software installed on our machines, I have produced 4 training modules.

I am currently working on putting together another 2 modules.

In creating all 6 modules I have experienced the following problems:

We have had problems recording the audio that links into each of the slides. We have used 3 different microphones (2 of which we purchased).

2 of the microphones have 'jack' connections and were similar to those that we used in the training session when we first purchased the software. With both of these microphones we are experiencing problems picking up the audio. It records intermittently and is extremely unreliable. Although the sound quality is good we cannot rely on the microphone to pick up all of the audio and we are therefore having to record (some often quite lengthy slides) and then play back each slide to ensure that the audio is correct. I have spoken to both my own IT people and Adobe regarding this problem and neither of them can establish why this is happening.

The third microphone we have used has a USB connection. This microphone records in essence perfectly and picks up all of the audio. However, there is a buzzing noise that sits over the top of the audio on playback - again I have spoken to both Adobe/IT about this.

During creation of the 2 new modules that I have been working on recently I have come across a new problem which is occurring alongside the audio issues mentioned above:

Whilst recording and saving the presentation (especially when accessing the quiz manager) my machine has begun to crash. This has resulted in all of the audio being removed from the powerpoint slides which it had originally been recorded onto despite me having saved it. This has proved frustrating as I have had to locate the audio files, import them back in to Adobe and then save again. This has happened on several occasions and as mentioned above recently the audio has been completely wiped from my machine and has had to be restored.   I have also received a pop up box asking me to re-start powerpoint and to contact www.adobe.com/support/presenter if the problem persisted.

I have also noticed that whilst using the quiz manager, I am having to keep re-inputting the questions although this has previously been done and saved.

I did originally think the above problems could be to do with my machine, but I have also used tested the software on 2 colleagues machines and they are having the same problems......

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as you can imagine this is becoming increasingly frustrating....

Jess

[Big_Muck]

Hi,

We record all audio in Adobe Audition (@44.1KHz) and then import it. We also use a Beringer studio condenser mic and a Zoom H4 interface to the computer. The sound qualilty is excellent. I also noticed once, that if you create a folder named audio in the presenter project folder for your working files, it can cause big problems.

What we are doing now is constantly saving the PP file while we are working on it and constantly making a copy of the media.ppcx file in a separate folder. so far, this seems to be working.

Cheers,

Mike

[mrock66]

Hi Jess,

I'm still working on getting some answers for you, could you email me @ marock@adobe.com?

Thanks

matt rock | Technical Response Team, Connect | 613-940-4076 | marock@adobe.com

adobe systems

my.adobe.acrobat.com/mattrock

[Guest]

We also are having problems with losing Adobe Presenter audio files.  We have multiple people working on our training presentations at different times, which are based on a shared network drive to make access easier.  So far, we have developed 17 training modules, but two different people working on two different machines have lost audio files on several of those presentations, but not all.  The media.ppcx file is lost, not when we edit the audio, but when we edit questions in the quiz manager or edit slides and notes.  I also lost the media.ppcx file once in the middle of saving the Presenter file.  When you copy slides with audio from one presentation to another, we lose the audio files for those slides as well.

We know that we lose the media.ppcx file, but we do not lose the actual audio files.  Even restoring the media.ppcx file and attempting to reconnect the audio has not really worked; we always must re-record the audio.  When we tried to restore the media.ppcx file from backup files, just opening the same PowerPoint/Presenter file resulted in the media.ppcx file disappearing again without our doing any editing. The one thing both users seemed to have done was edit in the quiz manager.  The problem, however, does not happen with every presentation we edit.  It has only happened a few times.  It is very puzzling.  Our current work around is to do all editing to slides, notes, and quizzes prior to doing the voice over.

I left a voicemail for tech support to call me back, so do not yet have a case number.  However, I wanted to add this information to your forum in hopes it would help tech support to resolve the problem.  Also would like to know when the next release will be available.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

E-Cat

[sproxton]

I have worked with Presenter for 3-4 years now, all of it actually doing work for Adobe - in Australia, the US and Europe.  I have recently run into very serious audio problems cause be trying to add any new slides once audio has already been recorded.

Quite simply, once audio (my voice) has been recorded onto the PowerPoint slides within Presenter, it is impossible to introduce any slides from other presentations (whether audio-less PowerPoint slides or narrated Presenter slides) or even add any new slides (using the ‘add new slide’ command in PowerPoint).  If I try to do any of these things, the audio from all the existing slides is either completely erased or the association between the slides and the audio files is lost.  I had this with the a presentation I was doing in August (when I lost the audio for 60 slides) and I had it again with a presentation I was working on this weekend.  Thank goodness I made several back-up copies before I tried to add some slides.

I was trying to add two introduction slides at the start of the presentation after recording audio for all the rest (90-plus slides in all). Remembering that adding slides from another presentation was dangerous, I instead created two new slides and then attempted to copy just the content of the other slides onto them.  That failed and the audio for the existing 95 slides was lost.

In another attempt, to create the two new slides I twice-duplicated an existing slide in the presentation (Ctrl+D) and created the content completely from scratch.  I really expected this to work (because I think this is how I did it once before) but again it said that Presenter cannot locate the audio files.

The interesting thing is that all the audio files are still there.  If I look inside the audio folder I can see the 90-plus audio files, one for each slide.  But for some reason when I try and add new slides, Presenter loses the association between the slides and the files.  Once that happens it impossible to do anything with Presenter – you can’t edit, synchronise, publish, anything.

I have read the later posts in this thread about the 7.05 update but it  turns out I already had that.  I notice that there is 7.06 patch and  have just installed it but I doubt it will fix this very serious problem.

Thanks

[memarsh100]

I have one faculty member experiencing similar issues. He was the one having the problems with the controllers that was resolved with the 7.0.5 patch. But he is still having the intermittent issue of audio files being dropped. Has this problem been resolved yet?

Melissa Lockhart

Teaching & Learning Services

432 Brackett Hall

(864)656-4296

memarsh@clemson.edu