Standalone application problem

[Dan Soneson]

Hi Andrew,

I treat external audio, video and even images much the same way as I  
would
in a web site. When putting together  a standalone that references  
this media
I put the media in a separate folder within the folder that houses  
the standalone
and work with a relative link to the media.  Say your standalone is  
in a folder
called "My Standalone." Create a media folder within that folder and  
place your
media in this new folder (or copy your media folder into this new  
standalone
folder). Then you query the path of the standalone, replace the  
standalone name
in the path with the media folder name, and reference your images/ 
audio/video
files using this new path:

put the fileName of this stack into theStackPath
set the itemDelimiter to "/"
put "MyMedia" into item -1 of theStackPath

Now you have a reference point for all your media, as long as it is  
housed in the
"MyMedia" folder. You can retain this in several ways. Perhaps the  
easiest is to
set a custom property of either the stack or the card:

set the uMediaFolder of this stack to theStackPath

Probably the best place to do this is in the preOpenStack handler, on  
the card script
of the first card to open when the stack opens. Don't put it in the  
stack script, or this
script will execute any time a stack opens within your standalone. So  
the preOpenStack
handler on the first card of your stack would look like this:

on preOpenStack
   put the fileName of this stack into theStackPath
   set the itemDelimiter to "/"
   put "MyMedia" into item -1 of theStackPath
   set the uMediaFolder of this stack to theStackPath
end preOpenStack

Any time you want to set the filename of a player now, you call up  
the uMediaFolder
of the stack and put the name of the media file after this. Then you  
set the filename
of the player to this path:

put the uMediaFolder of this stack into theFolderPath
put theFolderPath & "sound_01.aif" into theNewFile
set the filename of player 1 to theNewFile

You can place the above lines into a preOpenCard handler in the card  
script of the
card that contains the player, or you can place it on a mouseUp  
handler to set the new
filename.

This works nicely if you have only one audio file to play. If you  
want to play several, or
want to call up a specific audio file to play, you can use the  
uFolderPath of the stack to
get a list of the files in the media folder, display them as a list  
in a list field. In the script
of the list field you can write a mouseUp handler to set the filename  
of the player to the audio
file that you click on.

In a button or preOpenCard handler you can put a script like this:

on  preOpenCard -- goes in the card script
   put the uMediaFolder of this stack into theFolderPath
   put the defaultFolder into theOrigDefault -- keep track of the  
original default folder
   set the defaultFolder to theFolderPath -- allows us to get a  
listing of all the media files in this folder
   put the files into theMediaFiles -- this gets a list of all files  
in the default folder, one file per line
   -- you may want to do some filtering of this list here, i.e.  
include only files with ".wav" extension etc.
   filter theMediaFiles with "*.wav" -- this is optional, if you have  
a mixed type of files
   put theMediaFiles into fld "audio files" -- this is the scrolling  
list field, you can name it what you want
   set the defaultFolder to theOrigDefault -- restore the original  
default folder
end preOpenCard

Then in your list field script you would have a handler like so:

on mouseUp
   put the selectedText into theFile
   set the filename of player 1 to the uMediaFolder of this stack &  
"/" & theFile
end mouseUp	

The point is, that if you set up a connection to the media folder  
when you first open your stack, either
within the development environment or as a standalone, you can call  
up any individual file pretty
easily.

It was nice to meet you at the ISLS conference in Hawaii, and I'm  
delighted you are checking into
Revolution. Welcome to the Revolution!

Dan