Millisecond Forums

Sound file trouble

https://forums.millisecond.com/Topic2529.aspx

By MelissaM - 2/24/2009

Hello! I'm looking for some help on playing sound files in Inquisit, as this has several of us stumped.

In my experiment, participants are listening to a sound file before making judgments about what they have heard. The sound files we are trying to use are all .wavs. The problem is that, while we can get a completely unrelated wav file to play, as soon as we put the experiment stimuli wav files into the script, the program crashes (but shows no error message beforehand). The files are are trying to use are digitally recorded uncompressed wav files.

One idea that we had is that the wavs were too small -- most of the files are around 35-50KB. Putting the larger files into the script doesn't seem to help, though.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how we can solve this problem? I really appreciate any advice!

- Melissa
By Dave - 2/24/2009

Hi Melissa,

since nobody has responded to this yet, I'll try and give it a shot. In general, I think it would be a good idea to make your script and the troublesome soundfiles available for download. You may also assemble a stripped-down version if you don't want to post the full, original script -- just make sure that the file you put up reliably produces crashes on your systems. This way, other users will be able to check if they can replicate the problem. Just zip the whole thing up and upload it to any of the free file hosting services (rapidshare, megaupload, etc.) if you don't have any personal webspace available. Anyways, here are a few other questions that might reveal useful information in troubleshooting this issue:

(1) Which version of Inquisit are you running? The latest official release is 3.0.3.1 (http://www.millisecond.com/download/win/Inquisit_3031.exe), but there's also a beta release of the forthcoming 3.0.3.2 (http://www.millisecond.com/download/win/Inquisit_3032.exe). You might give that a try also...

(2) What are the exact specs for the troublesome wav-files? Sample rate, bit-depth, mono or stereo? Which program(s) were they created with? I.e., what's the difference between the (unrelated) files you *can* get to play and the files that are causing you trouble? Are you able to play these files outside of Inquisit (e.g. in Windows Media Player)?

(3) I'm guessing that you use the <sound> element to present the wav-files. You might try using the <video> element instead, which can also display sound-only files and tends to be more flexible in terms of the formats it accepts.

That's all for now. Hope to hear from you soon!

Best wishes from a fellow Inquisit user,
~Dave
By Dave - 3/3/2009

So, has this been resolved? If so: How? What was causing the problem?

~Dave
By ChaNce - 9/14/2009

I was having this problem, but the fix (seems to be easy). Originally, I was coding the /items for sound like this:


<sound targetA>
/1 = "sound1.wav"
/2 = "sound2.wav"
/3 = "sound3.wav"
</sound>

They have to be coded this way:

<sound targetA>
/items = ("sound1.wav", "sound2.wav", sound3.wav")
</sound>

That fixed my problems.


Andrew
By seandr - 9/14/2009

Yes. If you are reusing the sound files with different <sound> elements, you could also do this:


<sound targetA>
/ items = targetAItems
</sound>


<item targetAItems>
/1 = "sound1.wav"
/2 = "sound2.wav"
/3 = "sound3.wav"
</item>


-Sean