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The Arsenal Files 6
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HINTS.TXT
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1995-09-10
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Common questions and answers about PMsndX.
Q. How do I enter the registration information?
A. To enter the registration information, pull down the
menu from the control panel and select either the
Welcome or About menu item. The display will contain a
button to bring up the registration display. The
information may be entered from the keyboard or from a
file.
Q. Where is the registration information stored?
A. PMsndX stores all of the registration information in the
os2.ini file. This amounts to about 20 bytes of data.
Q. Why is the executable greater than 500k?
A. Duh. The source for this program is about 40000 lines
of C++. There is about 100k of icons and graphics that
takes up a lot of room because the icons contain
versions for each of the different displays (e.g.
Independent Color Form (=VGA), Independent Form - (1.2
format), and 8514 - 16 colors). Also, the .RES (resource)
file for PMsndX is 230k (which includes the icons and
dialog descriptions). The REXX portion of the code
takes about 100k and the rest is the dialogs and alogrithms.
Q. I have a Sun audio file that plays on my Sun machine but
results in a "Unsupported style" error when PMsndX attempts
to load it.
A. Sun hardware supports U-Law files with and without headers.
When a header is not present, the Sun hardware assumes that
the sampling rate is 8012 Hz. If a Sun file results in an
unsupported style error, force it to load the file in the
.ul format and specify a rate of 8012 Hz. Alternately,
if the "Require Header for files" is not checked (the
default) in the MISC page of the Properties, any file with
an extension of .au will be loaded as .ul if a valid .au
header is not present.
Q. What happens when I try to play a 16 bit sample on an 8
bit sound card?
A. PMsndX is capable of editing and manipulating sounds
of any number of bits, rate, and channels. However,
audio adapters may be limited in their capabilities and
may not support multiple some of these characteristics.
Therefore, PMsndX will still load and manipulate samples
that cannot be played on the audio adapter but the MMPM
dialog will disable all of its buttons. If you have
an 8 bit audio adapter PMsndX will automatically detect
that it cannot play 16 bit files and set the "Play 16
bits on 8 bit audio" box in the properties dialog box.
Q. Can compressed VOC files be loaded?
A. Unfortunately, I cannot find documentation on the
compressed VOC formats and they are not implemented in
PMsndX. A future release may have this corrected.
Q. I have a file created by sox10. Why can't PMsndX load the
file?
A. SOX for DOS and OS/2 were ported from the Unix environment.
Under DOS and OS/2, as a file is read or written, the data
is filtered so that single linefeeds are replaced by carriage
return-line feed sequences. Under Unix, this does not occur.
As a result, a SOX file cannot be loaded because it has extra
characters in the header and body of the data. SOX needs to
be recompiled with the file IO system set for binary so that
it does not try to filter the data.
Q. I want to load a large sample. How do I minimize the
memory requirements?
A. When a file is loaded it is stored as 16 bit samples
regardless of the actual sample size. This takes up
roughly twice the memory as would be required for 8 bit
samples. The MMPM buffers make up a second copy of the
data in memory. This copy is exactly the size of the
data that would be written to disk. If it is an 8 bit
sample file, then the samples in the buffer are 8 bits.
If it is a 16 bit file, then the buffer contains 16 bit
samples. During an editing operation (i.e. cut, paste,
or anything in the toolbox) the data is double buffered
to allow the operation to be aborted. Finally, when the
UNDO capability is enabled from the settings dialog, a
copy of the last sample will be maintained for the UNDO.
So, to reduce the memory requirements, make the following
settings:
Go to the PLSNDX settings page and set "Free memory after
loading". Clear the "Enable Quick queueing" also.
Go to the EDSNDX settings page and clear the "Enable UNDO"
checkbox.
Go to the Editor page under EDSNDX of the properties and
set the "Delay AUDIO Loading" (you can still play
the sample by using the Editor menu and selecting
"Load AUDIO Data Now".
Q. Why doesn't the little man run when the REXX window is
minimized?
A. If the REXX window is minimized to the Viewer, it will
still be animated. However, if it is minimized to the
desktop OS/2 does not process the SETICON messages and
the icon is not animated. There is nothing I can do about
it.
Q. When I load a file from the command line, it does not
play in PlSndX.
A. Check the AUDIO page of the Properties dialog and set
"Play on Load" or "Play on commandline load". Without
one of these options selected, files are only loaded
when specified on the command line and are not immediately
played.
Q. I have a file that will play with PlSndX but will not play with
EdSndX.
A. PlSndX implements a feature which can automatically resample
a file so that it is a multiple of 11025 Hz; however, EdSndX
does not implement this feature. The MMPM/2 system for OS/2
performs better when the sampling rate is a multiple of 11025 Hz.
EdSndX does not implement this feature because it is intended
to be an editor in which the original sample is preserved.
Q. EdSndX crashes when the play button is pressed when the playpos
cursor is at the end of a sample. Sometimes play just stops
after pressing the button and a second press starts it again.
A. This is a problem I have run into with MMPM because I have to
convert the returned ending position from 1/3000th seconds to
indexing values. The problem is caused by roundoff error and
by MMPM reporting a position that is not exactly the end of the
file. To correct for this, I have added a setting that lets you
specifya Zone in which I can detect the end of the file myself.
The default value for the zone is 300 samples, but you may need
to increase it to get better performance. When playing back a
sample, this value has no effect. It only affects how I interpret
the signals that come back from MMPM/2 when I go to start playback
again.