Leading into the home stretch before release; it’s bug squashin’ time! I’ve put the current dev version of Voxsmith to work this week and expect to really be able to put it through its paces! I’ve already found 2 bugs and was able to correct 1 and redirect the other.
Voxsmith, at its core, attaches audio to PowerPoint slides, programically, automatically. This is amazing when you run Voxsmith as the first part of your design process, when it’s just the raw slides from your curriculum team or SME. Easy peasy. This is what the original Narration Generator did. Just make sure not to use it on slides with animations; it would do bad things.
Researched this and found a bug in MS PowerPoint COM implementation where it literally re-writes animations when an audio file is attached via COM. This is problematic, since I also want to be able to use Voxsmith during my design phase, when I need to correct a typo or adjust some timing. And I don’t want to drag on drop.
To work around this limitation and to make sure I do not get the angry “YOU BROKE ANIMATIONS ON MY 200 SLIDE DECK I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON FOR 6 MONTHS!” emails, I developed an animation detect, backup, restore, redirect:
When Voxsmith runs, it first digs into your deck to grab the script and check for animations, if there are any found that aren’t text-boxes, it backs them up, removes them, attaches the audio and restores the animations. It’s amazingly elegant to watch!
This doesn’t work with text boxes. PowerPoint gives special rules to text boxes, making them mostly untouchable in the way I want to back them up. No, I tried that. Tried that too. Not to worry. Instead, when Voxsmith finds these animation types, it will still process your narration, but it will only go to your Output folder and it will not attach to the slide. Drag and drop rules apply, because animations.
I’ve also started building short-codes for Voxsmith that will let you do certain things. To start, it’s a simple way to get Voxsmith to “Read the slide” that is slightly faster than copying and pasting the slide text into the notes. I will be using short codes to facilitate deck splitting (“chunking”), Making Voxsmith the complete tool for dealing with learning video creation from PowerPoint.
Wait until I start teasing you about Voxsmith 3. It is going to be wild!