SkullTroniX (tm) Support

BuckaneerBabe · Joined: 29 Sep 2007 Posts: 8

Exorcist seems to be having trouble playing sounds through the proper channels. If I use the same avi file and play it with Windows Media Player it plays back through the proper channel, but Exorcist will play a voice say through the center channel and the right front channel when it is only supposed to be the right front.

My plan is fairly simple. I have 5 talking skellies, 1 Parallax board to control the 5 skellies. 1 vsa routine that runs all 5 skellies. But unless I can get the sounds to play through the proper channels, my project is doomed.

I have created both individual 7.1 avi sound files for each skellie with their particular lines assigned to separate channels and a single 7.1 avi sound file with each skellie's voice assigned to a separate channel. Using Media Player all of the sounds play correctly but when individual sound avi files are simultaneously played through Exorcist, they don't play through the proper channels and many of the sounds don't play at all.

BuckaneerBabe · Joined: 29 Sep 2007 Posts: 8

Got it to work. I'm not sure if it was me, my hardware or Exorcist, but what seemed to fix things was converting the avi files created with 7.1 Sound Mixer to WMA files using the instructions for Windows Median Encoder in the Exorcist manual.

BuckaneerBabe · Joined: 29 Sep 2007 Posts: 8

I created 5 soundfiles for playback. I couldn't get each sound file to start at exactly the same time so near the end of my 2 minute program, where all of the props sing the same song, the timing was off. I had 5 songs playing out of sync.

I created the individual sound files so I could use Exorcist to control the volume of each sound file, but since there was a slight delay in the start of each sound file, I had to create one sound file with 5 channels and abandon the volume control idea.

I also learned something about 7.1 audio. The left and right front speakers play at a lower volume. In the future I might try increasing the volume on the sound file for those channels to try and balance things out.

Phoenix · Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 248 Location: Chester, UK

There are a lot of strange oddities with 7.1 Audio, the part of the problem is the 7.1 standard isn't exactly set in concrete and many manufacturers have a slightly different interpretation of the standard, my personal system is based on a very cheap 7.1 card which is devoid of a lot of 'intelligent' filtering software that mid rage sound cards have.

Lets put it this way.. a cheap sound card is dumb, if you connect a 8 speaker system and the sound only plays trough 2 speakers, then you only get sound from 2 speakers, a more expensive sound card tries to be clever, it knows you have 8 speakers, and thinks that its a waste to only using two of them, so reprocesses the sound to make more efficient use of the unused speakers... gee thanks!

Unfortunately turning off these features isn't always easy, you have to go trawling through the 7.1 software or drivers and find the 'turn off Jim Bobs funky sound processing' button, sometimes I wish there was a really big and obvious 'just do as I damn well tell you' button!

Exorcist just triggers Windows Media Player to play the sound, the sound controls you see in Exorcist are just remotes for Windows Media Player

Trying to sync several separate sound files is not always easy, its surprising how small an error the ear can pick up on with sound to sound syncing, yet be able to tolerate very large sound to motion errors.

Sometimes a lag can be corrected using timers ie instead of

sound 1 triggers on input 1
sound 2 triggers on input 1

you could have

sound 1 triggers on input 1
sound 2 triggers on timer 1

timer 1 triggers on input 1, dwell 1, reset on sound 2 active

This second method would start sound 2 1/10th of a second after sound 1 starts.

_________________
Bryan Davis
Phoenix Animatronix