[Gambas-user] Managing soundtracks, WAVs

[Rolf-Werner Eilert]

Hi Jean-Yves,

you're right:

> ...
>> At this time, as far as my own needs are concerned, it would be ok if it 
>> had a "set to zero position" button and "start". The tricky thing would 
>> be following the signals from the projector and keeping the soundtrack 
>> synchronised to them. If there was a playback speed option, it would 
>> make things somewhat easier. Without it, you will have to correct the 
>> position from time to time, resulting in little "jumps" or "stutter" of 
>> the sound.
> 
> This is quite a nonsense unless you have another track that indicates where
> is the next possible jump (usually @ the beginning of a music measure) - in
> case it is music, for speech there's no solution.

It's ugly. But I think, most projectors run so evenly that in 99 % of 
the cases the sound will play synchronously anyway. Maybe a very slight 
correction after 10 or 15 minutes would be necessary.

However, there's one thing I've discussed with other folks in a film 
forum. They proposed to take the film with a video camera first and then 
make a soundtrack for it within one of the usual video cutting programs. 
This way you would have it basically synchronous.

The trick would then be to have this resulting soundtrack run 
synchronously with the projector when the film is shown "in real". Just 
imagine, you have every frame on the video and the soundtrack fitting to 
it, but the projector might not have the correct speed but could vary in 
speed by a few frames. The art in it would be analysing on the fly how 
much THIS very machine differs from the speed of the soundtrack and 
adapting its playback speed so it plays synchronously after a while.

And as you put it, it must be so smoothly that the audience will nearly 
not hear it.

> 
>> Many years ago, in the time of i386 machines, I programmed a similar 
>> thing under DOS with PowerBasic, but as far as I remember, I never found 
>> an easy way of reading the impulses, and of course I missed an app for 
> 
> Use the parallel port, or on some machines (if it already exists) the swi 
> switch/connector.

Good idea :-) But which switch/connector do you mean?

Rolf