Digital Workshop

I understood that version 4 of Opus Pro had its own inbuilt player for ogg vorbis soundfiles and that this meant that DirectX was not needed to play them (unlike mp3).

I've just converted all my old sound files to ogg vorbis and they do not play in my Opus publication unless I enable DirectX sound. Am I doing something wrong... or is this intended behaviour... or is it a bug?

As I understand from previous postings you do not have to convert a sound before you import it into Opus. Use the play sound action to import a WAV File.

When you Publish the Opus file click on the Options tab in the Publishing Settings. There you can enable audio compression on a scale from 1 - 10. The built in OGG- Vorbis player is used for the standalone publication. I've tried it and it works quite well . The size of the WAV file is strongly reduced and the quality is quite good

Thanks, Klaus. My reason for manually converting the files to ogg vorbis is that it gives greater control over file size and sound quality.

DW could you please clarify: are ogg vorbis files still reliant on DirectX sound or am I doing something wrong?

I think it should work without DirectX, can't think of a reason why it wouldn't. So this may be a bug. However, why disable Direct Sound? The sound, and DirectX in general seems pretty reliable these days, and presumably 99% of people are using the default DirectX mode without issue.

It doesn't work for me without DirectX sound, so there may be a problem there.

Why do I want to avoid DirectX? Quite a few people still seem to have issues with the DirectX troubleshooter popping up when running publications. They then disable DirectX for that publication and can't then hear the sound files. I'd rather use slightly simpler transitions and avoid having to keep supporting DirectX problems if possible. I thought the inbuilt ogg vorbis player would help me to do this.

In an ideal world everyone would have all the latest drivers and the most recent versions of DirectX installed on their computers. Unfortunately this is unlikely ever to happen. Many of the people who register for the courses I produce are completely non-technical and are scared to death by even the simplest modifications or upgrades to Windows. They are simply interested in the subject the courses teach and just want to pop the CD in the drive and have it delivered without any technical jiggery-pokery on their part. Not always possible, of course, but I'd like to keep things as simple as possible. Asking them to edit the registry to re-enable sound for a DW publication is pretty scary stuff for some of them.

Hi,

Thank you for your enquiry.

Regarding the OGG Vorbis issue, this does appear to be a bug and our developers are currently looking into this problem.



I appreciate that you want your publications to run on the widest possible range of systems without problems, but it's not unreasonable to expect a client to ensure that their systems are capable of running multimedia-heavy applications. Many games and interactive CD-ROMs on the market force the user into updating DirectX if an old version is detected.

It is relatively easy for your publication to check which version of DirectX the client currently has installed - simply use the following script action:



Depending on the information returned, you could recommend updating to a later version of DirectX, if necessary, and issue a Launch File action which launches the DirectX 9.0c standalone installer (which you can provide on your publication CD).

I hope this helps. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further queries.

Kind regards,