Digital Workshop

I tested out the mouse click effect and found that they are loud and crisp in the preview but hard to hear in Flex. Can this be compensated to work like it does in the preview mode?

Rick

Flash (and therefore Flex) compresses sounds to keep the size of the file down. This can have an effect on the quality of the sound. Have you set the audio compression (on the Publish Settings dialog at the third step of the Publish wizard) to a high setting?

The preview does not do the conversion to Flash (since that would take the same time as publishing it every time); it uses the normal Opus preview. For this reason we always recommend that you test your final Flex publication for any slight differences such as you are seeing.

Hello Duncan,

Thank you for your assistance. I published this time with compreesion off - and still the sound is not like in the preview. So Opus, behind the scene, is modifying the audio sound effect which degrades it. There is no other option I see in the settings. I tried to slide the audio compression controller then re-publish and still no noticeable change.

Regards,

Rick

Hi Rick
what sort of sound format are you using?

German

Hi Koala,

The sound is an effect which is packaged with Opus (mouse click).

Thank you for your concern,

Rick

Hi Rick
It could be very well the "Ogg Vorbis" format that now is in use by Opus Pro XE. I have done quite a lot of experiments with this format using Flash and I don't like the quality of the final output. Since Flex use the same (almost) Flash technology perhaps there is something similar happening...
I frankly do not like this format (that is just my opinion, people are free to like it so please do not bash me up for this comment!). I am not quite happy with the way it sound. Try to convert the sound into a windows compatible audio format. Try variations of formats. I am sure you'll find the answer in a different format.

Regards
German

Yes, ogg is the format of that sound effect. Is that a legacy format?

Really helpful - I thought I was doing something wrong - you may be correct. I will test and return back with the results. That would mean that you would have to convert the sound effects to wav or use another effect library - what a waste of manpower. Is there a utility DW offers to convert ogg sounds to another file format?

Appreciate your help,

Rick

Hello German,

For some reason, I got the ogg to work up to high quality. I donwloaded a free ogg to wav converter: http://www.mediamonkey.com/

I then batch processed all of the ogg files to wavs. I then used them and the fildelity was much better (like in the preview) compression off. I then check compression on the tested again this time using the ogg files, BAM they now work in high fildelity in the Firefox browser. What happend?

Thank you again and I would try to reset your compression settings to off and then reset back to compress. Audio settings I moved all the way to the right. All works fine now.

My regards,

Rick

Rick,
I'm glad you fixed your issue. If you have previous versions of Opus just move all the sounds folder into your folder of Opus Pro XE 5.0 and use them instead.
This is what I have done and have no problems at all. I don't know why is the reason of DW using the ogg format now. It must be a commercial reason but no good for us....
Cheers mate
German

We used OGG for the sample sounds because it offers a huge compression over WAV - it literally halves the size of the install, which is in the interests of us and our customers - with no discernible loss in quality in normal use. It is also not encumbered with the patent issues affecting MP3 encoding.

However, it seems like there may be an issue converting OGG to ADPCM, which is the only format Flash actually understands - everything else (including WAV) is converted at publish time. We will look into whether this is an inherent issue or something we can change for a future release.

We will include the original WAV files on future versions of the Opus CD (but not the download due to the size). In the meantime if you are working in Flex you can simply convert the OGGs to WAVs using various free tools available on the net.

Erm no - ADPCM is just one of several compression codecs Flash can use when rendering out the finished file. Flash MX also offers MP3, RAW (uncompressed) and Speech (optimised for speech) - all of which play back fine in the standard Flash player.

MP3 has a major advantage in that you can ask Flash MX not to alter the file when it renders out - so you can use your own external (and probably better) MP3 encoders, and then load the finished file into Flash safe in the knowledge that it is not going to degrade the sound quality any further when the finished file renders. I've been supplying MP3 music and sound assets to other Flash programmers for many years for this very reason.

Far as I'm concerned "ADPCM" and "good sound quality" are mutually exclusive.

Rob Kirkwood
www.visibleform.co.uk

You're right - I've looked at the code and MP3s are passed straight on to Flash and OGGs are converted in the same manner as normal WAV files.
Anyway, there seems to be a potential problem with OGG conversion, so for now we will reccommend the use of WAV or MP3 for Flex projects.

It is upon closer examination that we have discovered in our recording labs that all wav sound effect files which are assigned to mouse actions are somewhat degraded when compared to the original file. We have not test other file types.

The part which is more obvious is in the beginning of the sound file, the edge is usually clipped off.

Rick

It's the very same in my case. MP3-Sounds are played crisp and clear when played from the timeline. But every sound attached to a mouse down click sounds blur and low in flex.

Since the last postings belonging this topic are about 1 year old I wonder if a solution was found in the meantime.

T.

Since I was very early in my office this morning I had some time to take a closer look to this mouseclick effect.

I found out that it is not the quality of the sounds that differs between preview and flex but the speed with which the click sounds are loaded and played when clicking.

This effect occurs only with very short sounds (which is typical for the most mouse click sounds).
It seems that the click sound is started before it ist completely loaded. So the first 300 or 400 milliseconds are cut and what you hear is only a short part at the end of the sound.

I could solve this prob by adding a little bit of silence at the beginning of the click sound. 200 milliseconds worked well in my case. Maybe 100 milliseconds would do it too.

You can hardly hear a difference between the orginal and the extended sound.

T.