Digital Workshop

Hi! I've just started to use autonarrate, and am seeing inconsistent behavior on the first word of the text box. If I leave the "Autostart" button checked, when the page displays, the first word of the audio is spoken, but the first word is not highlighted. Highlighting starts on the second word. If I uncheck "Autostart" and instead use a Start Autonarrate command in the On Show script for the page, sometimes the first word highlights and sometimes it doesn't. Adding a 1 second delay before the "Start Autonarrate" command doesn't help - still see inconsistent behavior. Same with using an on-screen button to start the autonarrate - sometimes the first word is highlighted and sometimes it isn't.

I'm also seeing some glitches when I try to edit the autonarration. The buttons for add and delete dividers are grayed out. The editor window sometimes complains that it can't load my .wav file, sometimes doesn't complain, but even when it complains, the autonarration works okay (except for the "first word" problems noted above.)

The text I'm using is short (a Dr. Seuss book), Arial font 24pt, not bold or italic. The first word problem occurs with Red Bold and Red Highlight styles of highlighting. I've got a Dell Inspiron 8600 with 2GB, Windows XP SP2. Running Opus Pro 5.5.

Any help or feedback would be welcome. Thanks!!

jmardenslp@comcast.net

Try this to solve your problems aligning the highlighted words and the actual audio: Start at the end of the audio and work forward. You'll find dragging and dropping the lines which separate words and audio works best that way.

Work for awhile, then Exit and save your work, then come back to your last editing area to begin again. Using this method, I've had total success with this powerful multi-media tool.

Take a look under Properties -> Text and you'll see where you can change the color used to highlight your text.

Thanks, demofred! I do find it easier to edit from the end, moving backwards to the beginning. I've also discovered that the Add and Remove buttons do function, but only when a divider is selected. I'm still seeing the following issues:

- If there's only one word in the text, it will never be highlighted.
- The first word of the first autonarrate on the page is not consistently highlighted.
- when editing an autonarrate, the first time you press either the Play or Auto start buttons, there is always an warning that the audio file can't be found (.wav file in my case.) A second click to either the Play button or Autostart checkbox always works fine, warning does not recur.

I ***love*** the autonarrate feature despite these issues (but would of course love to have them fixed in the next release :-) I'd really like to see the ability to export the autonarration/animation to flash or Quicktime, so that I could create autonarrations to be included in other applications. I work with special needs kids who could really benefit from this feature in other applications that don't have it. Don't know if the inherent limitations of Flex make this impossible?

Jennifer