24 bit audio doesn't play correctly in Saymore

[Matthew Lee]

Hi guys, I'm in Second Language Acquisition at GIAL and decided to try Saymore.


I installed 2.1.80 on my machine (Windows 7 Ultimate) when I started.

At first, I was recording the sessions in 48kHz/16-bit wav...simply because that seemed reasonable. Days later, Will Reiman told us that 48kHz/24-bit Wav was the archiving standard, so I switched up on my H2n.

With the 16-bit audio (or worse), the preview player in SayMore works great.

When I switched to 48/24, they play interspersed with chatter. A nearly unrecognizable playthrough is mixed with noise at full volume. It's as if saymore doesn't understand how to play 24-bit, though it picks up all the stats correctly. Originally I was playing them without FFMpeg installed, but now it is installed and still doesn't work.

These 48/24 files play in WMP, SA, WAVELAB, and Audacity without problem.

I upgraded to 2.1.136 to no avail. Uninstalled, reinstalled. No go. The GIAL Lab computers have a very old alpha version, .5 maybe?, also on Windows 7 that plays the same file fine on those.

I tried other combinations, the 16 bits worked in Saymore, but not the 24.
48 24 No
96 24 No
44.1 16 Yes
44.1 24 No
48 16 Yes
48 24 No
96 16 Yes
96 24 No

Next, I tried to play the files from the command line through mplayer.exe...works great. It's only Saymore that can't handle them.

Realtek HD Audio. Win 7 ultimate.

 

Has anyone else experienced this chatter?


On the same note, I realized that the player fails to play if there are special characters i.e. "ə" in the filename, and have sent in a bug report on that.






Complete name :

C:\Users\lee2mr\Documents\SayMore\Féfé\Sessions\Test\121029-151348.WAV



Format :

Wave



File size :

431 KiB



Duration :

1s 420ms



Overall bit rate mode :

Constant



Overall bit rate :

2 489 Kbps



Producer :

ZOOM Handy Recorder H2n



Encoded date :

2012-10-29 15:13:48



Encoding settings :

A=PCM,F=48000,W=24,M=stereo,T=ZOOM Handy Recorder H2n MS S: 0



Audio



ID :

0



Format :

PCM



Format settings, Endianness :

Little



Codec ID :

1



Duration :

1s 420ms



Bit rate mode :

Constant



Bit rate :

2 304 Kbps



Channel(s) :

2 channels



Sampling rate :

48.0 KHz



Bit depth :

24 bits



Stream size :

399 KiB (93%)

[John Hatton]

Hi Matthew,

> When I switched to 48/24, they play interspersed with chatter.

Thanks for the report. Can you describe what I should here in the file you attached? I can only get some kind of click, in various players.

jh

[Matthew Lee]

It's just a couple of seconds of recording. You've got it right, but i attached a real data file to this post.  If you run into the bug, it'll sound like there's a helicopter taking off in the recording room.  I'll try to do a loopback recording of the error in the morning so you can hear what I'm getting.

 

As I said...I find that the 24-bit files play in mplayer (command line), WMP, Audacity, SA... just not when Saymore calls mplayer.  I'm assuming I'm the first person to mention this.  I was tempted to blame realtek, but it works everywhere else.

 

~M

[Matthew Lee]

This is a loopback recording of what I hear on my speakers when I play the file through SayMore.  I just confirmed the reproducability of the error on another Windows 7 machine.

 

Saymore 2.1.136 (using Book.wav as before)

 

[Steven Bird]

Recording at 48kHz in 24 bits is going to create large files. I wonder of this is motivated by the context. I've heard of people going up to 96kHz for digitizing historic tape recordings once and for all.

For most field uses I think 44.1/16 is perfectly adequate. If you don't expect to be doing instrumental phonetic analysis (eg you might be using the built in mic, in an uncontrolled recording environment ), then 16/16 would probably be just fine.

-Steven Bird

[E.B.]

Hi all,

I've installed SayMore version 2.1.135 on a Windows XP notebook. When I
start playing a video or audio file, it looks as if it is playing, but
there is no sound or picture and now progress in the progress bar. There
is no error message.

I can start doing an annotation and the sound is played correctly when
doing the segmentation, but later, when I want to do the annotations it
doesn't play the sound either. I'm able to convert videos into audio, so
it seems that the FFMPEG is install correctly.

Any ideas, what could be the problem? The same project works correctly
on Windows 7.

Esther

[Matthew Lee]

Hi Esther,
Does the filename for the media have any "special characters? I've found that the player does what you describe if you use more than Roman characters.

~Matthew

[tom_bogle]

I just borrowed an H2 Zoom device, and when I put it into 24-bit mode, I am able to reproduce the problem you are having. The recording sounds fine outside of SayMore, but inside SayMore the playback sounds like machine-gun fire. I'll see whether I can figure out what's causing this.
-tom

[tom_bogle]

Matthew,
Please note that installing ffmpeg has no bearing on this issue since SayMore always uses mplayer for playback off audio files because of its support for variable-speed playback. I believe the problem with 24-bit files was introduced a couple months ago when we added the -ao win32 switch to mplayer in order to work around a bug where mplayer truncates the last little bit of the file being played back. You say that mplayer correctly plays back your file, but when I try it (with no command-line switches) using your book.wav file, I notice that it gets cut off (truncated) at the end. If you have found a set of command-line switches that result in proper playback of this file, please let me know. If I use the -ao win32 switch, it sounds like it is successfully playing back the whole file, but it's a little hard to know for sure because of all the noise. One option would be to omit that switch for files over 16-bit, but it appears they will still have the truncation problem.

On Saturday, November 3, 2012 8:51:01 PM UTC-4, Matthew Lee wrote:

[J V C]

I wonder if this issue is something the MPlayer developers would be willing to fix, now that it's pretty clear how to duplicate it. (Though it's likely you've already tried that route.)
Jon

[E.B.]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks a lot for your hint, it was exactly what I needed. The media file
name itself didn't have any special characters. However the name of the
project and the project folder were in Cyrillic letters. So apparently
not only the file name, but the whole File Path shouldn't have any other
than Roman characters, when you want to use SayMore on Windows XP.

Esther

[Matthew Lee]

Tom hit it on the head.

 

It was never confirmed to me that anyone else could reproduce it….so I was still trying to track it down.  On the command line, that –ao win32 produces exactly the error I was referring to…and it makes sense why the old version on the lab computers didn’t chatter. Running with no switches sounds good to me.

 

I would think that the truncation bug would be more of a priority for the mplayer team (or guy).  I’m playing with other builds of mplayer (http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php) that still respond in the same chatter to –ao win32. I haven’t noticed any truncation yet, but I wasn’t listening for that.  Good luck convincing them to fix it.

 

If you can get mplayer to fix this…Anki (flash cards) and any other app that uses it can benefit from the same fix. Yay!

 

Back to Homework

~Matthew

[tom_bogle]

One additional interesting factoid: The tester trying to reproduce the problem on Windows XP was unable to do so. The 24-bit recordings that didn't work on my Windows 7 machine all played back just fine on the Win XP computer. So that seems to suggest that the problem may not be in MPlayer itself, but rather in the windows audio driver. This morning, I was able to find a command-line switch which seems to correct the problem. Sadly, I don't think I understand why or how it fixes it, but sometimes you just have to be content with mysterious success. A new version should be available soon.

[tom_bogle]

Yes, this is (unfortunately) a known limitation of the version of mplayer that ships with SayMore. I'd like to hope this has been fixed by now, but since mplayer is mostly developed for Linux, it's hard to find any recent builds for Windows.

[John Hatton]

Esther,

> So apparently not only the file name, but the whole File Path shouldn't have any other than Roman characters, when you want to use SayMore on Windows XP.

 

Thanks for letting us know about the problem. We have a fix in the latest version (2.1.137). Could you please install it that and confirm that we fixed your problem?

 

thanks

jh

 

[John Hatton]

Matthew

 

Thanks for working with us on this problem of playing 24-bit audio. We have a fix in the latest version (2.1.137). Could you please install it that and confirm that we fixed your problem?

 

Thanks

jh

 

[Matthew Lee]

Test Success!

 

I tested my special character (ə) in the filename (Which was stopping the preview in windows 7). That works now and didn’t before! 

 

On the other front, I don’t know if you’re still down-sampling to 16, but I can hear my data!  Thanks to you all for both of these fixes.

 

~Matthew

[E.B.]

Hi John,

Thanks a lot for the fix. It's now working correctly.

Esther