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From: eallen@mercury.sybase.com (Ed Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Playing Long Sounds in Hypercard
Message-ID: <12437@sybase.sybase.com>
Date: 23 Apr 91 00:00:34 GMT
References: <672033604.3@mmug.mn.org>
Sender: news@Sybase.COM
Reply-To: eallen@mercury.UUCP (Ed Allen)
Organization: Sybase, Inc.
Lines: 36

In article <672033604.3@mmug.mn.org> Jim.Spencer@p510.f22.n282.z1.mn.org (Jim Spencer) writes:
>
>Earl Nall writes in a message to All
>
>EN> A sound resource in Hypercard can only be 32K same as a field 
>EN> size. However, the other night I saw an Apple salesman demonstrating 
>EN> a multimedia stack that had long sounds. I ask him how he overcame 
>EN> the 32K barrier and his response was that he wasn't aware there 
>EN> was that barrier. Apparently there is something I don't know. 
>EN> Do I need an XCMD to branch out and play a sound resource from 
>EN> a file?
>
>Why would there be a limit of 32K for a snd resource?  The limitation in field size makes sense as you have to access the text as offsets from the beginning of the field but I don't see any reason for limiting sounds this way and don't recall ever seeing 
>such a limitation in print.
> 

There is no 32K limits on snd resource lengths for HyperCard playback.
I have played much bigger sounds.  The real limit comes with the amount
of memory HyperCard has to load the sound.  If the sound is too big, as
often happens on a 1 meg machine with any inits, etc., it just doesn't
play.  If you want to play a really big sound you can dice it up
into separate resources and by using sequnetial naming or IDs  play the whole
sound via a loop.  A friend of mine has played music that lasts for several
minutes using this trick.  Eats a lot of disk space to keep the stack around,
though.  I forget whether you need to have a "wait until the sound is 'done'"
line after the play command to make this play seamlessly or not.

Using a CD for the source of sound for digitizing such long chunked sounds
is very helpful in getting the segments to match if you have to digitize
in parts because of memory limitations.





Ed Allen  eallen@sybase.com