Temporary picts

[Mark Talluto]

On Wednesday, March 20, 2002, at 06:33 PM, Shari wrote:

>> This is what I would do.  Set up all of your sounds and music in one 
>> file.  Put a one second delay in between all the sounds.  Then you 
>> write down the order in which all the sounds are laid out.  Know the 
>> timing of each sound and you can have QT play from 10 seconds into the 
>> file up to 15 seconds.  Do this with as many players as you like and 
>> you can really go to town.
>>
>> The only hard part is the setup.  Once it is done though you have a 
>> solution that will be easy to use through the program.  You could even 
>> write a small randomizer that would call on random tracks if you like 
>> and play them.
>>
>> -Mark Talluto
>
> No thanks!  I doubt my computer even has enough memory to handle a 
> sound file that big.  You want me to put 200 sounds in one long sound 
> byte, many of them much longer than a single beep, and try to figure 
> out where each piece starts and stops??  And do this for every program 
> I create???  That's nuts!  I have programs with that many sounds.
>
> Might as well program in C... a whole lot of code just to accomplish a 
> simple task.  I fell in love with Hypercard for its ease of use. For 
> its simplicity.  I bought all the C books and Codewarrior Gold awhile 
> back, but guess what?  Decided I did not want to waste time doing 
> things the hard way when they could be done the easy way.  Even if I 
> had to make sacrifices for the simplicity.  And as we all know, 
> Hypercard was a wondrous tool but could not compete with C.  I gave 
> that choice a great deal of thought, before choosing Metacard.  It was 
> not an easy choice.  But simplicity and ease won out.
>
> As with Hypercard, I chose Metacard for ease of use.  Otherwise, I'd 
> crack open my C books.
>
> Shari C

200 sounds per program was a piece of information you had not mentioned 
earlier.  I do not know why I did not just suggest that you put all the 
sound files into one folder.  Read the directory of files and put that 
into a variable or a property.  Then create a randomizer that will call 
on the different lines in the variable.  Play that line (which is the 
name of the saved sound) through a player.  The amount of code needed 
would be just a few lines.

If you need them to play seamlessly from one file to the next, that 
would be the biggest trick.  I would start out by having your program 
get the size (in time) of the file it is going to play first and have a 
send command create  another player and start it at the estimated end 
time.

Yes it would be nice if you could do it the old way from HC.  But there 
are alternatives that should work out just fine.  What you get in the 
end is longer sound code, but advanced features not available in HC 
without a truckload of externals.  Don't get me started on the power of 
running on multiple platforms.

Put your C books down and put your diskettes of HC away and give this a 
try.

-Mark Talluto