Squeak Sound and NT

Paul Fernhout kfsoft at netins.net
Wed May 20 20:57:11 UTC 1998


John Albert Fehr wrote:
> The Squeaky Wheel wrote:
> > I mentioned several weeks ago that I was having trouble
> > getting sound files to play clearly using Squeak on a NT
> > platform. All the other sound files I have work just fine
> > on NT as long as I do not run them from Squeak. The problem
> > is the same in beta 2.0 as it was in 1.31.
> >
> > I am currently just booting into Win95 on the same machine
> > to and the sound in Squeak is great but this is sort of
> > inconvenient because I do almost everything else from NT.
> 
> I am working with Squeak 1.31 on NT and 95 and I have experienced 
> the opposite effect.  Sounds great on WinNT, problems on Win95 --
> especially with MIDI.  Since I am usually on NT, I haven't thought
> about it and I figured the problem (infrequent skipping/dropout, 
> fuzziness) was just a *feature* of Win95 or my SB-16 drivers 
> under Win95.
> "Hey Paul F., got your ears on?  Any ideas about this issue?"  8-)   

Sure. :-) Sorry I didn't notice this sooner; I upgraded to Netscape
Communicator 4.0 as someone on the list suggested to get the mail
filtering feature, and now all my Squeak list mail is filtered into its
own folder automatically, which I check once or twice a day or so.

I looked into this on my NT4.0 SP3 machine (Compaq 180Mhz 64 MB Ram ESS
sound system + Compaq sound drivers). I am working with Squeak 1.3. (You
could call me an early adopter but a reluctant upgrader. :-) So it is
possible 1.31 has changes that effect this.

I was able to read and play AIFF files without problems (once I bumped
the sample rate up to double the default). I had previously had problems
with opening sound files, but I traced this to trying to open read-only
files. It turns out in 1.3 (maybe later?) StandardFileStream
class>>oldFileNamed: send a "self new open: aFileName forWrite: true."
This fails when trying to read read only files from a sound effects CD I
have, or when I copied those files over without changing the read only
permission.

In any case, I got two files of around 500K (a kitten and herons) to
play without noticeable problems. Two shorter human voice samples ('a'
and the number '7') also played OK. The morphic sound examples also play
OK. In the past MIDI files played OK. Sorry I don't have a good answer
for this either. Is it possible you have the foreground/background app
tasking in the System control panel set to not give enough time to the
app in the foreground (Squeak)? I set it way down and it had no effect
on my machine, but maybe it effects yours.

-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software 
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Experienced Smalltalk Outsourcerers
Creators of the StoryHarp(TM) Audioventure Authoring System
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com





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