Digital Workshop

It would be a great thing to have better sound controlling in Opus.

I know this can be done via Opus Script, but I'm not much of a programmer so the following new actions in the Actions tab would really help a lot :

-Pause Sound to stop a sound at a certain position
-Continue Sound to resume the sound from that position

and maybe

-Go Back By to rewind the sound X seconds and
-Go Forward By to fast forward the sound by X seconds (similar to the Options in the Seek Video action.

Would be great to see those new actions in Opus 05 !

Hi Klaus,

I have forwarded these suggestions to our developers for review.

In the meantime, you should find that loading the sound file into an On Top video object will offer you the control you require. Please try the following:

- Launch Opus
- Create a blank new publication
- Select the Video tool and draw a video object on the page (the size and position are not important as no video is going to be displayed)
- In the Video properties, select the Browse button
- Open the 'Objects of' drop-down menu and select 'All Files (*.*)'
- Now navigate to the folder containing the sound file you wish to play
- Select the sound file and click Open
- In the 'Video Type' options, click Change
- Set the video type to 'On Top' and click OK
- Set the other properties as required, then click Apply and OK
- Now add a button to the page
- In the button actions, apply a Pause Video action, select the Video object you have just created and click Apply and OK
- Create another button on the page
- In the button actions, apply a Seek Video action set to the required amount, select the Video object you created, then click Apply and OK
- Create another button on the page
- In the button actions, apply a Play Video action, select the video object on the page and click Apply and OK
- Now preview the publication. The audio file should start playing and you should be able to control playback using the buttons

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

Kind regards,

Hi Robin !

Thanks for the kind help. But there's a problem.

I did as you instructed and the controls work fine in Opus preview mode. I can hear the sound, pause and continue it etc. But when I publish the presentation I can't hear anything . Have I missed anything ??

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

There does appear to be an issue playing WAV files in this way and I have forwarded details of this problem to our development team for investigation. However, you should find that MP3 files work correctly in the published version.

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

Kind regards,

Hi Robin !

Thanks for the suggestion. I encoded the WAV to MP3, published, and it works perfectly.

Two last questions :

-Do I have to enable audio compression in the publication settings if I use MP3 or only if I import a WAV file ?

-Can I be sure that the built in OGG-Vorbis player will play the sound on all of my end-user's machines correctly ?

Thanks for your help

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

As the help file states:

"The audio compression is only applied to uncompressed audio - it will not re-encode MP3's (for example) because this would result in a quality loss."

It therefore does not matter if the Audio Compression options are enabled or disabled, as these will have no effect on MP3 files.

Regarding OGG Vorbis, the published executable contains all of the libraries necessary to handle this format, so there should be no compatibility issues and the audio should play on all machines regardless of which codecs or Media Player versions they have installed.

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

Kind regards,

... but it seems DirectX still needs to be enabled or the ogg vorbis sounds will not be heard. Is this a bug? I thought earlier announcements had implied that DirectX was not necessary if using ogg.

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

Kind regards,

I followed Robin's (excellent) advice too and got an audio file working fine as a video object. The only thing is that the Play Video action I've assigned to a button always resets the file to play from the start again, rather than resuming after a pause which is what I want it to do. What am I doing wrong?

Niall

[quote="Robin Garrett"]Hi Klaus,

I have forwarded these suggestions to our developers for review.

In the meantime, you should find that loading the sound file into an On Top video object will offer you the control you require. Please try the following:

S'alright, fixed it now!

Niall.