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Forum Newbie
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 1/18/2011 6:22:25 PM
Posts: 4,
Visits: 12
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Hi everyone,
I'm designing an experiment in which participants hear a sound, and respond based on what they hear. This is the first time I've used E-Prime; I'm running E-Prime 2.0 Professional on Windows 7 64-bit.
In my experiment, participants see a fixation, then hear a sound and simultaneously see some text on the screen. They have to choose which piece of text corresponds to what they hear, and push a corresponding key on the keyboard.
The trouble is that sometimes, during E-Run, the sounds don't play; there's just silence, but it's still possible to respond via keyboard, and everything else works fine.
The sounds are .wav files, and they are all very short; sometimes they are <1sec. in length. I've tried playing them in Windows Media Player, to see if there's one that doesn't function; sometimes WMP has trouble playing them, too, but not consistently: if sound A.wav fails to play once, I can try that file again and it plays fine.
The same seems to be the case in E-Run. I listened to my stimuli for multiple cycles; on the first cycle, two stimuli failed to play, but on the second cycle those same stimuli played just fine.
Does anyone know why a sound would randomly fail to play?
My only guess is that these files are so short that sometimes they just don't load properly, but I don't understand why that would be the case. I looked through the E-Prime 2.0 documentation for any notes about a minimum duration for sound files, and can't find any. I guess next I will try padding all my sound files with silence, but since the problem occurs at random, I'm not sure that will help.
thanks!
Peggy
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Junior Member
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 10/20/2010 4:42:14 PM
Posts: 23,
Visits: 78
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Hello,
There should not be any minimum sound file duration in E-Prime 2.0. One thing to do is make sure that all of your SoundOut or Slide SoundOut sub-objects are set to "Streaming". To do this, go in the Property Pages for each and set Buffer Mode to "Streaming". Then try running again - depending on your version of E-Prime, there was a known issue where using "Buffered" mode would result in sound files being cut off.
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Forum Newbie
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 1/18/2011 6:22:25 PM
Posts: 4,
Visits: 12
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Thanks very much, that seems to have fixed it!
Out of curiosity, when is it a *good* idea to have buffering set to the default? When one has longer sound files?
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Junior Member
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 10/20/2010 4:42:14 PM
Posts: 23,
Visits: 78
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Unless something has changed in the newest version of E-Prime 2, I would say the answer is "never". 
The best practice right now is to always set your SoundOut objects and Slide SoundOut sub-objects to "Streaming".
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