Trouble playing sound files

[Hannah Witherstone]

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

[jens]

Hello

The sound files are all in .wav file format?
They are placed in the same folder as the experiment?

/Jens

On 31 mar, 21:02, Hannah Witherstone <h.witherst...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

[Hannah Witherstone]

Thanks for the reply.

I have tried .wav, as well as .mp3 which is my preferred format.

Yes, all the sound files are in the same folder as the experiment.

Hannah

[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

Hannah

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[David McFarlane]

Hannah, thanks for first going through the manual and making sure that
at least the sound tutorial works, that is always the first step. As
one of my longstanding troubleshooting mottoes goes, "Better to start
from success than from failure."

Now just a slight correction, Michiel Spape wrote:
> E-Prime will only work with wave files, forget about all other
> formats

However, EP2 can use .mp3 and .wma sound files. Mich, for good cause,
probably here refers to good old EP1, which indeed is limited to
standard .wav files.

Aside from that, I would follow Michiel's suggestions in full. You
might also take this to PST's trained staff at
http://support.pstnet.com/e%2Dprime/support/login.asp -- they strive to
respond to all requests in 24-48 hours, and this is pretty much their
substitute for proper documentation, so make full use of it.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder

[Michiel Spape]

Hi David and Hannah,

'Hannah, thanks for first going through the manual and making sure that

at least the sound tutorial works, that is always the first step. As
one of my longstanding troubleshooting mottoes goes, "Better to start
from success than from failure."

Now just a slight correction, Michiel Spape wrote:
> E-Prime will only work with wave files, forget about all other
> formats

However, EP2 can use .mp3 and .wma sound files. Mich, for good cause,
probably here refers to good old EP1, which indeed is limited to

standard .wav files.'

It can? Blimey :) I would, however, be careful using these two standards
for two reasons:
1. Due to both being compressed formats, I'd not be immediately sure
whether their timing is handled properly by E-Prime 2. Actually, I've
never been sure on that front by E-Prime 1 and .wav files (I've heard a
number of audible plops related to cutting of files or buffering issues
when I used 50 ms pre-buffered wav files with 10 ms fade-ins and outs).
Nevertheless, professional audio software tends to convert such files
into .wav (or .au, if you're on a mac) formats, presumably for related
reasons (can't be too sure on that though).
2. Due to .wma and .mp3 being lossy formats, you will cope with degraded
quality, never mind that (at higher bitrates) it may be only
psycho-acoustically subliminally so. I tend to think that if you want
scientific stimuli, you will always go for optimal stimuli; by their
definition, lossy formats are not. But perhaps, this is just a tech-geek
way of thinking, in the same way that I really like big CRT screens
running at 200 Hz!

Have a nice Easter, everyone!
Cheers,
Mich

[Hannah Witherstone]

You are all absolute Saints!

All sorted: I had to convert to .wav using Audacity and change the
sample rates in there - all files playing fine now.

Thank you,

Hannah

On Apr 1, 4:39 pm, Michiel Spape <Michiel.Sp...@nottingham.ac.uk>
wrote:

[Aceaka1]

Hi,

Thanks for the recommendations. I recently ran into the same problem and tried converting the file using Adobe Audition, but could not seem to resolve it.  I'm not sure if I made errors on my conversion though, since the error still pops up in E-Prime.
May I trouble you guys to help me look at the screenshots that I took for the sound file conversion and the E-Prime error note attached?

Warm Regards,
Ace