[etoys-dev] How can I play a sound from time A to time B?

[Mike Lee]

Wow. That's exciting to hear! 

I know from the wilds outside of Etoys that the typical approach to sync audio with tagged/structured text is with SMIL. This is simply a list of time stamps for the beginning and end of each word that is read by a compatible player app. The audio simply plays the sound as is and the associated SMIL list drives the moving text highlight. If, as you indicated, a click on a particular word can be captured, then it should be straightforward to have a script jump to the start of the sound for that word and just play that word.

It would be sweet if these time markers could be captured manually from within Etoys, perhaps in one of the sound tools then read by a script that links them to your named text blocks. Audacity can be used for this.

Generating the time stamps and tagging/structuring text for SMI-powered readalong content is almost always a labor intensive process unless one is using some kind of sophisticated audio pattern recognition capability. 

Mike

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 19, 2013, at 10:00 PM, Steve Thomas <sthomas1 at gosargon.com> wrote:

> So I figured out how to read in a paragraph of text and split it into separate words I can highlight as I read.  Still need to play around a bit to handle the different fonts/sizes and kerning.
> 
> Each word is its own Text object embedded in a Rectangle which "highlights" the words as I read.  I set the "highlight timing" by using the keyboard as I record the sound.  Then make minor adjustments as needed.  This will play fine in reading the whole sentence/paragraph.
> 
> But I want the user to be able to click on a word and hear that word spoken. Rather than re-record each word, I would like to be able to play a snippet of the recording.
> 
> So... How do a play a sound recorded in Etoys from time A to time B?
> 
> Cheers,
> Stephen
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