LiveCode Forums.

Greetings everyone,

I'm struggling with a strange audio player problem.

I'm running LiveCode files from a server. So I have an application (.app for Macintosh, .exe for Windows) that goes to source code stack on a server. I'm working in LiveCode 6.7.5. I cannot use versions 7 or 8 because of changes to the engine. (Why? I have hundreds of students with the desktop .app and .exe files created in version 6, which would all have to be replaced if I start using versions 7 or 8. Very unfortunate for me that the engine had to change and that new source code files created in versions 7 or 8 cannot run under a version 6 engine. But that's another issue.)

Anyway, my stacks have audio played via a player on every card. When run on a Macintosh, all the audio players work fine. When run on a Windows computer, the audio works on only about half the cards. It seems random. For example, the audio does NOT work on cards 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10 but DOES work on cards 2, 5, 8, 11. But it is consistent in terms of which cards work and which cards do not work. That is, cards 2, 5, 8 and 11 always work.

When I say the audio players don't work, I mean that they do not appear at all and I cannot hear anything. My scripts properly set the controller and other properties of the audio. I have dontuseqt set to false, but it does not seem to matter if I set it to true. And as I said, about half the players work, half don't, and they are pretty much identical. It happens even if the audio content is identical.

Finally the strangest part. When I (at runtime) display properties of the non-working players (using the answer command), they look fine. The players exist. They are in the location they should be. Their visible property is true. showController is true. All the properties are as they should be. But the players don't show and cannot be heard.

Anyone experience this? Any suggestions?

Thanks much,

Steve Alessi

Hi Steve,

the "controller" is a QuickTIme feature!

No controller when setting "dontuseqt" to TRUE, in that case you need to "roll your own".
When not using QT LC is extremely picky with media playback on Windows. It actually sucks!

What format are your sounds?


Best

Klaus

Hi Klaus,

Thanks. Generally I have dontuseqt set to FALSE. I just pointed out that I had tried "true" and it made no difference.

Steve A.

Hi Steve,

are you sure that QuickTime is installed on all the target machines?


Best

Klaus

Hi Klaus,

Yes, QuickTime is installed on the Windows computers. And per your previous question, the audio files are all .wav files. But as I pointed out earlier, they DO work about half the time. It is an oddly intermittent (though consistent) problem.

Sincerely,

Steve

Hi Steve,

sorry, no brilliant idea in that case...
Multimedia support currently definitively sucks in Livecode, at least on Windows!


Best

Klaus

Which version of 7 are you using?

And since it works reliably with data on some cards but not others, what can you determine about the differences between the working and non-working media files and/or their paths? Different codecs? Unicode characters in file path elements? Anything else?

Greetings,

Yes, it is beginning to look like it is the Codec that causes the player to fail. Even though the same Codec works on some cards and not others, when I use a more standard and less compressed Codec, the players work on all cards. The "offending" codec is one intended for mobile devices.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Sincerely,

Steve A.

EDIT- I may have complained too soon... Now it looks like the fileName of the players is not being set, because it was in an openCard handler, and openCard seems not to be firing in the standalone for the cards in question. (sigh) back to debugging....

I'm struggling with a similar problem - numerous modules that use a few dozen sound files, all same mp3 format. Originally done in 5.5.4 (I think), I've needed to do some maintenance on them recently and reliability of sound playback is just not there, though the paths are all being set correctly, not being run from a network, no odd characters in the path, QuickTime (re-)installed, etc etc. No problems on Mac, just Windows (7 and 8.1 intermittently).

If this isn't fixed I don't know whether I'll be able to continue using Livecode. Very frustrating and sad!

Curt

I'd send a bug report with a copy of the stack. The OP had success using a different compression method, so you might try that too.

Klaus wrote: Multimedia support currently definitively sucks in Livecode, at least on Windows!
Klaus

Yes, it's like we're sad, confused characters in a play... "Waiting for GoodAudio"
Tom B.

Yep!

I wish Livecode would license some of the multimedia player frameworks like MPLayer or whatever,
so it does not depend on the underlying OS mulit-media capabilities.

Example:
Mac OS X, AVFoundation framwork works great, but is limited in file formats.
The really common video formats like MKV cannot be played, so don't AVIs.

Waiting for goodaudio...
How about goodvideo on Win 10 with community 7.1.2?
My player controls don't work although my own code in a button does work.
MP4 and MOV files, Quicktime 4.78...

tomBTG wrote:Yes, it's like we're sad, confused characters in a play... "Waiting for GoodAudio"
Tom B.

It might just barely be worth the delay that gave you the chance to say that...

Hi Erik,

erikhans08 wrote:Waiting for goodaudio...
How about goodvideo on Win 10 with community 7.1.2?
My player controls don't work although my own code in a button does work.
MP4 and MOV files, Quicktime 4.78...

the latest version of QuickTIme for Windows is 7.78!
Hopefully just a typo in your posting!


Best

Klaus