Automatic Playing of Audio Files

Found a very similar question/answer on your main site’s help section (should have checked there first, my fault). The one part I would still like to know is can I have the audio start as soon as that slide becomes active?

Thanks
Andy

In general, you have a lot of latitude about what you can put in the “media” section. Although it’s typically a URL, you can put an iframe that loads any page you like, with whatever behavior you can make that page have.

You can also put HTML in the “text” section. It may be that markup you put there can achieve the results you desire.

Note that generally, autoplaying media is frowned upon, as users may not be in an environment where sudden sound coming from their device is acceptable.

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the quick reply. I appreciate your advice on autoplay & have read it on many other sites. I am thinking of the timeline as having as minimal interaction as possible but we’ll see how users react to the autoplay. I tried the autoplay in the HTML5 audio command but noticed it plays once the timeline page is loaded regardless of the current timeline slide. If I use the ‘media’ or ‘text’ section would it only activate those pieces once the actual slide is active?

Thanks
Andy

Since this isn’t an officially supported timeline feature, there’s no way it will know when to trigger the play behavior.

The upcoming rewrite of Timeline (due out in about a month, previewable at https://timeline3.knightlab.com) has better event handling, so a javascript programmer could probably work out a way to trigger sound from when a specific slide loads. Or if not, we feel much more like we could develop that kind of wiring in the new version of the code than the current one, which is kind of tangled up with software evolution issues.

Thanks Joe.

Andy