think(box)

Is there any chance that person who had no (midi) sound has their MIDI or SYNTH sound level turned down all the way or muted? Ask them to double-click the loudspeaker graphic or otherwise activate the sound controls to check MIDI/SYNTH settings. MP3 and WAV sound may work fine (they are both WAVE sound) while MIDI does not, since MIDI is produced by synthesizer hardware in the system sound card and usually has its own level and mute controls.

Enable the TV/VCR output for your system, if it has one, and connect that output to your VHS VCR and record your P2E show on VHS tape. Almost 100% of notebook computers have TV/VCR out, and a large percentage of desktop systems have it as well. Here is a quote from a previous forum posting on the TV/VCR output topic:

I have the need to provide information TO a running P2E show, such as a slide number to goto for a resumed show. Igor, could we please have a feature that can be enabled for the home slide upon startup only to read the clipboard, and if it has a number string (slide number) then goto that slide number to begin show? We can use utilities, other app's or Windows script commands to place a character string number on the clipboard prior to starting the P2E show. There may be other useful information to bring IN to a P2E show, such as text and/or credits in chosen language, context-sensitive information that is keyed by slide "run app's" for example, P2E show parameters like display time per slide, play clipboard-specified slideshow or app upon exit, an image file (path, name) to display when show developer specifies, etc.

Lori, I'm sorry to hear about the difficulty. Email is so heavily scanned and filtered today in this age of virus paranoia (and sadly, susceptability) that I can't send email from AOL to MSN with any high probability that it will be delivered, for example. Email is just not 100% reliable for delivery due to faults in either the sending service or the receiving service or both. So my suggestion is to provide a different email address to Inna, not on the same service provider as the address used so far. Many people have second and further email addresses today. Maybe that will help in the event that your email reply is being lost in cyberspace. Your key delivery experience is really the extreme exception, and not the rule. Service is generally very prompt as Al indicated.

I am quoting swan_atn to move this suggestion thread to the wish list and add my own ideas: So far the expectation is that double-clicking could cause errors like double-running an application. While I think this problem could be resolved with a built-in delay before a second single click action can be repeated, there may be an alternative that isn't error-prone and that offers even more options to the show developer. In the context of right-handed people, while a left click is commonly used in Windows to open items, a right click is just as commonly used to get a context-sensitive pop-up menu with multiple actions. In a P2E show a right click on button, photo or hyperlink could have various actions, like: Popup menu items like "Buy", "Add to wish list" (runs app, passing pic#; must add parameter passing to run app!) Popup menu with P2E functions, such as Print, Save, Goto slide <section name> commands (slide # added by us) Information listing, like camera settings for pic, or names of people and story of pic, description of place Popup menu item to play audio description of photo subject (plays a sound file) For left- and right-handed preferences, either left or right mouse click could have context menu or action, as desired by slideshow developer. I'm sure there are other good ideas that could further add to the utility of this extra click feature set. Thanks go out to swan_atn for the suggestion, and to Al (and others?) for feedback on this feature

I read that RIAA set the lawsuit threshold at 1000 or more songs downloaded and that the individuals were involved with further distribution of copied material. I've heard some say they will go back to taping or otherwise recording off-air broadcasts as they used to do instead of buying. Usually the problem is stated as an excessively high CD price tag. These same people will probably spend $20 on a single dinner meal at a restaurant. It's not just the CD price tag. It's human nature. An opportunity to personally benefit from a seemingly minor offense that is without consequences is too hard to resist. For every heavily abused avenue (we) have to give people a clear expectation that there will be consequences in order to curb the abuse. I am very concerned about how many people I see running red lights and endangering me every day. Far from where I live, in California they put automatic cameras at most major traffic-lighted intersections. The violations at such intersections always result in a consequence (a violation ticket), hence it greatly reduces violations. Affected governments, businesses and individuals must work hard to keep order in a civilized world.

Bubba, perhaps these two quotes from PS6 help will explain Stu's technique:

Olga, thank you for that very nice photo and to Oleg for your help! I really like that picture - and if this is OK with you, I wish to use it for a holiday card as you did. I will add your name to the photo and tell the story about it, with pleasure A holiday CD with the "3o+2i" masterpiece slideshows (Olga, Olga, Oleg, Igor Novikov and Igor Kokarev of course!) with selector show would be a very nice family gift.

Good detective work Matt, and under critical deadline pressure too! Although not specified, if the failure happens at the same point in the show every time it is played then there will be no more than a few suspect slides, and only one or two suspect music tracks (two if switching tracks at failure). The module mentioned in the failure, 'P2e_prev.exe', says that failure was during show preview, guessing at Igor's naming convention. For sure Matt knew what was going on at time of failure. I wonder if the software that created the failing JPEG will do this again, such that it should be reported & updated.

I do not know whom to thank for this show since he/she is not listed in the credits and I can not tell who it is from the email address listed on Beechbrook pte page. Regardless of that, thanks! I don't know if it was ever mentioned in the forum, but thanks also for the earlier show about the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, USA. That too was a very well done and interesting show. I have been following the Mars story and I viewed Mars with a personal telescope in August, but no ground based telescope image compares to the Hubble and lander shots. Your P2E show photos are of very high quality and have very helpful surrounding text descriptions. I will share the link to this show with many friends and family members who have been following the Mars story as well. I will also mention WnSoft and PicturesToExe when I share this link. I think that all P2E shows placed on Beechbrook should have a credit and clickable link to the WnSoft web site to promote the really cool software that makes this possible. Nice show!

Tom, I enjoyed your show! The fractals were interesting and the dissolves smooth and of good visual timing alone. I can see that you used masking for the single fractal shape content change first, and then the faces. Were those the only two places where masking in a photo tool was used? I expect that all of the color transformations are just dissolves from related, but modified, fractals. Fractals may be just mathematically generated images, but they can interesting, amusing and/or entertaining art too. I agree that the sound transitions were a little rough (track to track, not track to image). I use cakewalk Pro-Audio 9 software and multi-track edit the WAV digital audio data to perfection. Sound cuts, adds, blends, fades, compression/expansion dynamics, frequency response, midi/wav mixes, etc are a breeze. After edits I convert to MP3 or now OGG for shows with dBpowerAMP (the best!). The process works well and isn't too time-consuming. But you can't buy Pro-Audio software any more since they have switched to a new product line called Sonar. I have chosen to not "upgrade" to something that is all new, maybe better, but also maybe not. On this note, if anyone in the forum can compare Pro-Audio 9 to Sonar I would appreciate the input. Many shows, including your fractals show, have images that are interesting to hold/pause for study. Your 3-D images were especially interesting. I know that many prefer locked shows (custom sync) because music to image correspondence is forced, but I appreciate that you didn't do that in your show - instead allowing pause, back and forward. This will change very nicely in a few months when the next major PTE version is released, as Igor seemed quite definite about including pause function for ALL shows. If he makes it such that we have a checkbox for "Allow timing to go out of sync and music to continue", then we can watch shows perfectly timed or not by choice at viewing time. Whatever choice the show developer makes, we will be able to pause ANY show, picture alone or picture+sound as created. Concluding on the sound topic, since I do not need to switch to Audacity or otherwise I can't help on better sound editing, unless you get a cakewalk Pro-Audio license somehow. Thanks!

Wow, that was a fast change! The centered image is much better. Thanks! The 12 to 20 second delay on clicking the X to close JPGViewer is still happening, so I guess we'll have to wait for other user reports to see how common this is. I'm wondering if this is in any way related: On your Win98 system have you updated to Microsoft's latest fixes from Windows update? I have, and since then there have been occasional lockup-like lags with Internet Explorer. They are similar to what I am experiencing when closing JPGViewer, except that IE6 lags happen for simple web access situations. I have been considering removal of recent Microsoft Windows updates, since this same problem has been experienced by others with much faster systems (it's not just a fluke).

Granot, when I click on X to close JPGViewer it takes over 12 to 20 seconds to close (Win98SE). During this time my system is nearly locked up and the mouse cursor is barely responsive. Can you look into this and make the JPGViewer utility close immediately? Thanks! At first I thought there might be Internet activity from JPGViewer, but it turned out that Spyware from a pop-up ad on the Mirriam-Webster dictionary web page, m-w.com, was doing that when I closed JPGViewer. So I killed the spyware. It is still taking a long time to close JPGViewer.

This is a handy utility Granot - thanks! For a test case I used the Menu demo show pictures folder from Ralph (Hawk) through Beechbrook. Ralph has some very small pictures (e.g. a button graphic) and some very large ones by comparison. This turned out to be a good test case. In JPGViewer they were displayed at the top left corner of screen. Because of the widely varying size it takes a moment to notice that the next (very small) photo is way up in the top left corner after just viewing a large photo. Can you make JPGViewer display each photo at the center of screen instead of top left corner? Thanks

Thanks for the demo Ralph! You did some nice flower photography for the sample linked shows subject. I would like to point out a very nice PTE feature at work in Ralph's demo set. The Auto Run button in Ralph's Menu show starts a series of connected shows, each fading to black and then the next begins. These shows are connected using the PTE feature "Run application after last slide" from Project Options --> Advanced tab. I know this because Ralph kindly gave us the .PTE files to open and study. The nice PTE feature is that the exiting show waits until the new show is running and visible before completing the exit. In this manner we do not see a brief view of the background menu between serially linked shows as each new show is starting in Windows. P2E's function makes it look like "Auto Run" starts a combined single show when in fact it is several in a series --- being presented very smoothly.

Stu, you have written a good general purpose note about relative vs. absolute file paths. This is a good topic reply to link for future questions that relate to paths. As many have found, using CD-ROM has special path considerations because you never know what drive letter will be used to play the CD (in the future) when you are making the CD. Thanks!

Oleg and Olga, I have sent email to each of you. Thanks! Olga, it is not the Sanguinary Laws of Nature that I was requesting enlarged. That is too scary for me! It is Ñ ïîñëåäíèì äíåì çèìû! (The Last Day of Winter) that I would like to have enlarged. Thanks!

Olga, thank you for the links! With pleasure I have viewed your entire foto.ru collection. I was going to list my favorites here but the list became much too long. One of your post card works was quite stunning, with the colors of the rainbow in the snow blowing from the trees: Ñ ïîñëåäíèì äíåì çèìû! (The Last Day of Winter) I would love to have a high-resolution copy of that beautiful winter shot, if I may. In the Animals genre, Æåñòîêèå çàêîíû ïðèðîäû (The Sanguinary Laws of Nature) has the most colorful (and well photographed) spider I've ever seen. In the Still Life genre, you have some shots through the stems of glassware that are quite impressive. You have very many exquisite images from many genres. Your photography is just amazing. And from what I read in foto.ru members' comments, you have a very large and happy audience. Thank you for sharing the links to your art. I will save the second link for some more viewing pleasure tomorrow!

cc, I watched your show last night when I downloaded it, and again tonight while not quite so late. It is truly something the happy couple can treasure in the years to come. I was most impressed with something that is really very simple, the elegant framing border art used in many of the slides. It is just perfect - and literally so, as well. I couldn't help thinking about how imperfect the lines would be on a television screen, being near the edges. Computer screens spoil us. And the decorations, and er, wedding celebration "debris" for backdrop photos had a nice, warm and pleasing sense. There were many other very pleasant stylistic touches throughout. Very nice. Congratulations on the family of two, soon to be three!

Oleg, Olga and Olga, I very much appreciate your entire collection of art! I am curious about the orthogonal pattern design early in the show, and I am most curious about the 3-d objects backdrop. If I may ask for another precious secret to be revealed, how was that created? And the now legendary show production and text art - that is so, so nice. But the mystery is where you least expected. In living and beautiful color, it was indeed the photographs that I found mysterious. So.... Îëãà Áîðèö÷ ! (Ïîæàëóéñòà ïðàâîïèñàíèå îòãîâîðêîé åñëè íåïðàâèëüíî)

Olga, Oleg, Olga, I have once again enjoyed the stunning photography in your namesake show that was created to perfection with Oleg. Only this time I used my special P2E pause utility to study the photographs more closely. Igor may have promised sync show pausing in future PTE versions. I have it today. Olga, even when I could take more time to study your works, I couldn't solve some of the mysteries.

I finally locked down a skipping & timing bug with a repeatable demo and have sent its zip archive to Igor for study. This one happens when an MP3 track starts with an image. There may be only one skip/timing bug(?!) Igor needs demo cases with repeatable failures so that he can be sure all is OK. Al, this one was found on Win98SE, FYI.

This is strange, regarding tucows. I loaded it within minutes of Leif's posting seven hours ago today, from tucows through Irfan's site and it is 3.85 for sure. I hadn't allowed the installer to update my menu shortcuts, so the menu said it was 3.80 while the actual application said it was 3.85. I fixed the menu entry manually. By the way I used New York as the tucows file server choice.

Jim, when I read your post with wish list and priorities in that other topic I thought it should be here. It is good that you took care of that. This topic is a very complete wish list that Igor can use for reference. I think he is so well organized that we could be a lot sloppier with postings scattered all over the forum and he would still do very well. If nothing else this one-stop listing will possibly give Igor more time to work on features. Posts that describe bugs get immediate attention, so they can be scattered without impact. But the next release features really should be accumulated for everyones' benefit, since new releases come out about every 4-5 months (in recent history).

You are welcome, Guido. The failure is clear and ready for Igor to debug. Regarding your march-end.ogg sound file I think it just has a rough start. Even dBpowerAMP doesn't start very well on that audio file. I did a lot more testing before posting this reply. This is a long one, but here is the sound performance understanding that I have today: The skipping performance issues are not quite so clear, nor is it easy for Igor or *anyone* to code around the sound system hardware limitations. I believe the fundamental cause of skipping and the place to properly "fix" it is in sound card data buffers. They simply should be larger, so that Windows can be sloppy with the sound data stream and yet not cause skips. But that is not the way sound hardware is today in millions of systems out there. We're stuck with undersized hardware audio data buffers in sound cards. Even eight years ago the industry was using 1MB in video cards. If they used just 1MB buffers in sound cards, there would be a seven second sound buffer duration, totally eliminating skips. There generally hasn't been enough market pressure to justify the cost of larger hardware buffers in sound cards. So I wish to declare that I just don't have sufficiently complete, validated and repeatable failure information regarding RELATIVE performance of P2E audio when compared to Windows Media Player audio, using WMP v9 as the metric. WMP v9 doesn't repeat play the sound buffer data when it skips, while P2E does repeat. Hence WMP and P2E skip differently, but they both DO skip under system CPU load stress. Some of the other forum topics and replies have taken shots at the skipping issue, but do we have conslusive test results? I want to look at some nasty stress-test a/v cases that I have for CD-ROM based shows, but haven't yet built them under v4.11 and loaded them to a CD for playback tests. Under P2E v3.80 I had zero trouble with sound playback, playing entire very large shows from CD (over 600MB). P2E v4.01 had a "slow loading" problem with my very large a/v shows, so I kept them at v3.80. P2E v4.11 has totally fixed load time issues, as has been posted. But there is a fundamental difference with v4.11 sound playback. The sound data is no longer copied to hard drive for WMP playback as it was in earlier P2E shows. I have simply had so much fun using the new v4.11 features and working out dramatically more interesting show designs that I haven't covered the basic sound performance tests sufficiently. I know that I have more skipping than before, but I do not understand it well enough to give Igor a specific case to debug. And I have tested stressful shows ONLY from hard drive. I have placed small, low-stress shows on CD and they do work correctly. Perhaps one good test is to take all of the Beechbrook-posted shows made since v4.11 and load the whole bunch on a CD for playback testing. I've only played them from hard drive so far.