Daveo

Thanks very much to both of you for your ideas and suggestions. Al, I think I will go and download your "adjuster model" and see how that might help me out. Is the software pretty intuitive or will there be a steep learnng curve to get the utility from it? Thanks in advance for your help here. Regards, Dave

I have had a couple of instances where I am trying to sync multiple songs to their own set of photograhs within a slide show (lyrics fit with a specific set of photos). My most recent example was for a friend where he chose 9 different pieces of music. He wanted a certain set of photos to line up with photos for each song but have them all connected into the full slide show. I struggled greatly trying to move the photos through "project options", "custom syncronization". This took me untold hours and quite a bit of frustration. What I wanted to do was to designate a batch of photos and then tell them to start and finish with one song, link to the next batch of photos which would sync to another song and so forth. I even thougth that maybe the solution was to write 9 short slide shows and see if I could link the .pte files so one would boot as the prior one finished. I determined this would be slow and would not flow seamlessly enough. There is probably a solution that is easy here but I don't know what it is. How have others of you done this? I hope my somewhat rambling message makes a bit of sense. Thanks again, Dave

I have since merged the 3 MP3's and the slide show seems smoother. At least there have been no more crashes at the music transitions. I am continueing to work with Boxig to develop his multiCD software to run flawlessly on XP. I plan to distribute some CDs with several slide shows for them to choose from. Simple will be the ticket to success here. Boxig is working with me to keep it simple and visually appealing. We still have a few things to figure out but he is really being helpful. Dave

I have been working diligently with Boxig over the last 24 hours to get his applet to work well with my slideshows. I think we are almost there now. Thanks very much for the URL to get to the MP3 merger. I think this could be a big benefit. I already merged the music but haven't tried it out yet with my PTE files. Should be interesting but all of my problems happened right at the music transition so I have pretty high hopes this will solve it. The help you guys have all so willingly provided is terrific!! Thanks again!

Many thanks to all of your for your help and many suggestions. I tried a couple of things: I added a couple of dark slides as I transitioned between MP3's. These slides are only 5 or 6K in size and seem to give the processor a boost for the spike it gets when the new MP3 loads. I waited to load any large photo files until the music is up and running. This seemed to help. How do I combine my MP3's into one. Is there a sound editing software package you are all using here? 2nd question: I need to auto boot a CD to a menu where the user can choose between 2 slide presentations. Any ideas on how to do this. I found something in an old file someone had posted on WnSoft but I was unable to make it work. Any new solutions out there? Right now it seems to be working on my pc but I remain concerned that I may have tried to pack too many photo into a short time with one transition nearly stepping on the one after it. I will keep my fingers crossed and let you know how it goes. Again, thank to all for your help. If you have any ideas on my 2 questions above I will appreciate them! Regards, Dave

Guido, thanks for the response. My cpu is a P3 running at 977mghz. I have somwhere over 400K of RAM. My transitions are fast as I am loading about 267 photos in 10 minutes while 3 MP3's are loaded and played. Most of my photos have been reduced down but remain from about 80K to 150K on average in size. I am having the trouble right when the next MP3 loads up. I inserted a "dark slide" at that point to take the load off the CPU as it is only about 5K in size. This seems to help but it is still unstable. I plan to give some CD's to some lacrosse players and parents from the season's games so I can't take a chance the cd will fail when they load it on their pc. Thanks for the help! Dave

I have been struggling with a presentation I have been working on for a couple of weeks now. My presentation has about 250 jpegs running in sync with 3 MP3's. I can get it to run most of the time but not consistentaly. Many times it will lock up or start to flutter while doing the transitions. Any ideas on how to fix this? My photos run from about 60K to 200K each. The total file size with MP3's is about 37meg. Thanks in advance. Dave

I notice my PTE shows I am using version 3.75beta #2. How is it that I download the latest version? Will it just go over the top of my current version? Will it know I'm a paid customer or was I supposed to keep a password to get the upgrade? Regards, Dave

I have been using PTE now for about 6 months and have made 8 slide shows that I am very pleased with. I have invested a good bit of time producing these shows and now worry that as technology and software moves forward I could face having my work lost as I become unable to run them on tomorrow's platforms or operating systems. I suppose this was the one (and possibly the only) advantage to the old photo album approach to archiving your photographs. Has there been any discussion on how to keep our PTE presentations current or must I assume in 10 years the slide shows I enjoy today on my PC will no longer be functional? Of course I have the original raw and Jpeg images but recreating a show would probably be prohibiitive to start from scatch again. Thoughts from anyone on this topic? Regards, Dave