[BUG]: Audio button MISSING where Video attached?

Hi LingQ Team

Please advise if there is any known issue with the Audio button icon missing when Video are available in the lessons?

  • WIn11-Desktop using Chrome and Edge browser, same issue across several languages

If my lessons have Video attached then there is no ‘Audio’ button icon showing, just a single icon for ‘Video’, and when pressing the Video button, it shows the usual audio progress bar AND opens the video as well…!

No AUDIO button showing:
Both Audio bar and Video open:

If there is only Audio track for that lesson then the audio works as expected.

Btw, Android version of same lessons working as expected with no apparent issue on Audio or Video selection.

Thank you for any feedback or workaround.
Br, Frank


4 Likes

Hi Frank, it is not a bug, but expected behavior on web app. Audio player button for YouTube lessons was replaced with the video play button according to user’s feedback (preferred to hear sound from original video instead of text-to-speech voice) and now you can play YouTube video in Listening mode too (from lesson’s page you need to select play synchronized text). Thanks

This has broken the entire course that I’m currently working on in German.

The youtube channel has made the videos private so they no longer work, but I was still able to listen to the audio and read along on lingq. Now I have no access to the audio at all.

I’ve been working through this course for the last week with no problems, but as of today I have no more audio.

I would imagine there are a lot of courses in the lingq library that have this problem of the video no longer working on youtube but they all still had audio so it wasn’t a problem. I think this change will break a lot of older courses.

Can you please change this back to the way it was?

I know the audio files are still there because if I click “play course audio” on my iphone I can play the audio files. I normally do most of my reading and listening on the web though and save the phone for passive listening. It’s very frustrating to not be able to access the audio file on the website.

2 Likes

AAARG! This is a disaster for me.

I have many, many lessons imported from YouTube that I share with my students. The audio playback button did NOT give the text-to-speech voice in these lessons. It extracted the audio from the video. So students could listen to the audio without playing the video.

For reasons I won’t go into, many prefer using the audio only or can’t access YouTube.

PLEASE bring back the Audio button.

(The system is still splitting out the audio. I can download it. But it isn’t available inside the lesson.)

Why, why, why, do people have to fix something that isn’t broken?

All that was necessary was to remove the text-to-speech capability if people didn’t use it (I didn’t like it myself). But the Audio alone option could have stayed.

(I just spent a whole week preparing more lessons where I expected students to be able to use this feature.)

4 Likes

Hi #Lingqlearner / LingQ Team

I’m a bit mystified about this.

How many actual users gave that feedback? Was it something you also shared that you would do this in advance to see if there were other opinions? Is it possible to give a ‘choice’ whether this is implemented or not?

Not sure what you mean by your reply “audio from text to speech voice”… The audio in my lessons was already imported from the video, as I understand always happens when a video is imported from Youtube.

Does this new action now also prevent ‘SCROLLING’ mode view from the current lesson you are studying wherever a video is attached?

There are times I want to watch the video, and time I just want to listen to the audio, I don’t want to show the video player all the time, and the scrolling mode view is one I use quite a lot too.

*** UPDATE: I found by trying that I can minimise the video screen view, and then I can still see the ‘SCROLLING’ view … while the video plays beside it!

Initially not sure about this, but I suppose will work around or get used to it. I can always remove the video links if needed. I usually page through while listening to audio, and move cursor through new-ish words, but even with video minimised it now covers a significant portion of the right hand pane.

Thanks for any further feedback …

1 Like

Similarly - once you open the video in a separate tab - Firefox allows you to pop the video out by pressing: Ctrl, Shift, ]. The video will then follow you from tab to tab.

I prefer it to the Lingq video controls because the Firefox pop-out is easier to resize and move.

Here’s a link if I wasn’t clear: About Picture-in-Picture in Firefox | Firefox Help

1 Like

I also miss the audio track button! I prefer to just listen and read the lingq transcript, rather than also being distracted by the video.

Hi Everyone, thanks for the feedback. The fact of the matter is that we also would prefer to have the audio file available separately so you can choose to listen to the audio only or play the video. But, it has been brought to our attention that this functionality violates Youtube’s Terms of Service. Therefore, we have had to try and figure out how to enable all functionality while using the video instead of the ripped audio file. There are still some rough edges to be worked out but we hope to get things working as well as possible given this change.
Please be patient for a few days here as we sort through things.

7 Likes

Thank you for the explanation, Mark

I was kinda surprised YT hadn’t sued this feature out of existence all this time!

1 Like

Is Sentence View going to be affected, too? That seems to be playing from the ripped audio and not from YT directly.

For those who prefer to have a downloaded audio (due to not being permanently connected to the Internet), the work around is to manually download the MP3 file yourself and the subtitles, then import them as a lesson (i.e. not using the LingQ Importer add-on). There are various tools for this. Two include: MediaHuman YouTube to MP3 Converter & Down Sub. It’s definitely slower and more of a hassle, but if you rely on a downloaded audio file, then this is the way to go.

2 Likes

Yes, I know😥

Hey Mark… this is a real letdown, but I think it might be workable just fine IF there’s a way to have the regular dictionary page along with the video as there was w/ the plain audio. This may be a real trick on mobile since there’s screen size limitations but hopefully you’ll figure a way to get it working.

In the meantime I’ve been having a heck of a time importing short videos that were working fine just a few days ago… it looks like the text is getting truncated well before the 90 minute limit. :frowning:

I’m not having trouble but can’t find any videos of that length. If you continue to have trouble with long videos, report the issue to support at lingq with links to the videos you are trying to import. As for the other issue, we are looking at how we can get that working properly on mobile. Thanks for pointing that out.

Did this change also affect the recording of listening time. The app has never counted listening time for videos, but the website used to. Not getting credit for the activity toward your daily progress can be really frustrating and demotivating since I don’t have lots of time to dedicate.

1 Like

Hi tmemarsden!
The time spent watching video lessons will be accounted for the listened time.
This feature will be soon implemented in the apps as well.

1 Like

Will be or is currently? I noticed yesterday it isn’t tracking right now.

On Web the lessons with only video should track watching time as listening.
Those lessons, which have both video and audio are tracking only audio as listening for the moment, but soon will also account for watched video.

1 Like