Trouble playing sound files

[Michiel Spape]

Hi,
There's no need to 'try every combination'. Go to Windows Explorer, look up your audio file, right click, properties, and see summary. At least, if you use windows XP, you see everything of interest there: sample rate (22 kHz or 44.1 kHz), Channels (1 or 2). Your audio file is most likely to be the problem, especially if it has a funky sample-rate (24 bit for instance), or sample-rate (say 48 kHz for instance, if you took it from a DVD), or number of channels (if it'd be surround sound). So, first, what you need to do is edit your sound files using a decent editor, such as CoolEdit (my preferred one), nowadays called Adobe Audition (the bloat-ware adobe version) - you can find free trials on the web. Audacity is also okay, though not always very stable. Anyway, make sure you save it as windows PCM wave format (.wav), and notice the sample-rat and bitrate. Convert the files to a format any piece of software will understand: 44.1 Khz, 16 bit, stereo (cd quality - you might try something lower for timing, but lossy sound isn't brilliant either). E-Prime will only work with wave files, forget about all other formats (unless you work at the frauenhofer institut).

After that, start E-Prime, make an empty experiment and start with a single soundout object. Copy the file you made earlier in your experiment folder, browse to this file in the soundout filename property. Lastly, make sure the maxlength is greater than the number of milliseconds of your longest sample.

There's a detailed explanation on audio samples in e-prime and beyond in the infamous http://www.cognitology.eu/pubs/AnE-Primer2009.pdf

Let me know if this helped any!
Mich


Michiel Spapé
Research Fellow
Perception & Action group
University of Nottingham
School of Psychology


-----Original Message-----
From: e-prime at googlegroups.com [mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Hannah Witherstone
Sent: 31 March 2010 20:02
To: E-Prime
Subject: Trouble playing sound files

I am very new to E-Prime so please bare with me!

I have run through the 'getting started' manual and all of the
tutorials within.  I have successfully completed Tutorial 2 which
pairs the sound files 'Bob' and 'Linda' with images.

I need to create my own experiment which pairs a static image with a
sentence (will more than likely be recorded in .mp3 format), to which
the participant has to press the space bar when they hear a key word
within the sentence.  I need the reaction time (in ms) to this target
word.

For some reason I cannot get E-Prime to run my own sound files.  I can
make my own experiment and use the Bob and Linda .wav files provided
with E-Prime, but when I try and substitute these file names for
anything else the experiment crashes.  I get varying error messages,
all relating to the script line:  "Slide1_SoundBuffer.Load".  The most
common error message is:

Run-time Error (Line 263)
18005: Cannot load sound file "hello.wav"
Mismatched or invalid block alignment

I *think* this is due to the sound file format set-up in the
Experiment Object Properties (where you can select channels, samples
and bits per sample).  I have tried every possible combination in this
section and still cannot get my files to play.  This is the case when
I use various .mp3, .wma and .wav formats.  I can play all of the
files fine through my laptop, so I know the sound files are OK.

Any help would be much appreciated as the manual is of no use!

Hannah

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