new method of playing media

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
    The latest version of CLAN has introduced a new method of playing
back audio and video from CHAT files.  If you download a CHILDES or
TalkBank corpus that has "bullet" links to audio or video media, and if
your computer is connected to the web, you can use the F4 function to
play a single utterance without having to download the media from the
CHILDES site.  This also works for the Escape-8 continuous playback
function.  CLAN uses a new directory inside each folder called "media"
that tells it where to look on the web for the relevant media.  It then
contacts the QuickTime streaming server at CMU and plays the relevant
audio or video.  This function allows you to play without downloading
the big audio and video media files.  So this is a nice function to use
when you just want to browse through a database or perhaps have your
students do some browsing.  You cannot use this method to create new
bullets or do detailed sound editing.
    The things you need to run this are:
1.  A new version of CLAN
2.  Quicktime
3.  A new copy of the relevant corpus from the server.  Older copies
will not have the /media directory that is needed.
4.  A reasonably fast Internet connection.

Here are some corpora that have media associated.
1.  Audio:  Bernstein, Brent, MacWhinney, Florianopolis, LeNormand,
MiyataTai, TBI, YipMatthews, and Zhang.
2.  Video:  CRSLP-MARCS (Thai), Forrester, Ishii, McMillan, Rollins,
Wagner, Yasmin, YipMatthews.
3.  Almost all of the TalkBAnk corpora have either video or audio.

Good luck.  Please tell me if you have any problems with this.

--Brian MacWhinney