Monthly Archive for August, 2009

I was recently speaking with one of our customers and the simplest of concepts came up in our conversation, looping.  Either the entire presentation or just having some looping audio that serves as a background audio track whether its a standalone Presenter file from the Adobe Connect server or a Presenter file loaded into a meeting room.

Now looping the entire presentation is simple enough.  You can go into Adobe Presenter, choose Presentation Settings, Playback and select “Loop presentation” (see image #1 below).  This will cause the presentation to play in its entirety at the timing and settings you have established and when the final slide is reached it will automatically jump back to the beginning of the presentation.

Now setting up looping audio can be a bit more complicated but not impossible. The first thing to remember is that Adobe Presenter only supports one stereo audio track in the audio settings (see image #2 below).

What we have in image #2 is a small bit of audio on Slide 1 of our presentation. If you wanted that audio clip too effectively loop and play on every slide you could manually copy and paste the audio clip across each slide in the “Edit Audio” dialog (see image #3 below). Very tedious but it works.

Now do not go in there and drop an audio-only .swf file on the slides that will not work as you might expect. Each slide with the .swf file on it will treat that .swf file as a separate instance of the audio file and you will end up will a sort of infinite-loop. I think we called it singing in the “round” when we were camping and sitting around the camp fire where one person would start to sing and then a few seconds later the next person would start and so forth. This is not the type of audio playback you want to achieve in your presentation.  Perhaps in future versions of Presenter Adobe will make this easier or more intuitive but for now this is what we have to do.

If you have the time and want to do the work open up an audio editor like Adobe Soundbooth CS4, which supports multiple audio tracks and do some audio mixing or editing there.  You could have one track that is your background audio and another that is a voice-over, narration or other audio clip.  From Soundbooth, save or export the entire file as an .mp3 audio track and import that file into Presenter using the “import audio” setting.  I suggest importing to slide #1 and click ok.  Then go into the “edit audio” setting and adjust the slide markers (those little gray boxes with red lines that show you where one slide finishes and another begins) by selecting them and moving them left or right to overlap the audio waveform displayed in the dialog.  Ideally you keep the audio as brief as possible or use a very short background audio clip when doing this mixing in Soundbooth so that you do not run out of background audio before you run out of narration audio.

Also, Adobe has just released Presenter 7.0.5.  You can use the ‘Updates…’ option in Presenter to get the latest version or click here