E-prime 2.0.10 freezing / not playing audio issue

[Rob Manchester]

Hi

I'm trying to upgrade an experiment I had working on E-Prime version 1 to E-prime version 2.0.10.147. The experiment involves displaying a sucession of visual and audio files consecutively. It worked pretty well in E-Prime 1, but since I have moved it to E-Prime 2 I get a sucession of strange occurences where E-prime seems unable to play audio files consitently or appears to freeze instead of displaying sounds. These are problems that were not present with E-Prime 1. I also find that E-Studio will occasionally run very slowly for no particular reason.

The disappearance of the sounds seems to happen at random and doesn't produce any error message, so it is difficult to debug. All sounds during the experiment are played via the same object - a slide with a 'soundout' object embedded. The soundout's duration is 1250 but it terminates on the pressing of either the 1 and 2 button. It is followed in the code by an inline object with the code "sleep(1250-c.getattrib("TonePlay.rt"))" which ensures that the next tone doesn't start until 1250ms after the previous tone, even when the previous tone has been terminated by a button press. I've played round with the prerelease (currently 500ms) the onsetsync (currently 'none') the buffer size (currently 1250) and the buffer mode (currently 'streaming') of the 'soundout' object and the best I can get it to do is incosistently play.

One reproducible problem that does occur is at the start of the paradigm.  The participant is asked to press the space bar three times to hear a tone each time. This is done by having a list object which cycles the same procedure 3 times. The procedure contains 1) a text display (giving the instructions to press the space bar) of infinite duration that terminates on the pressing of the space bar. 2) the aforementioned slide with a 'soundout' object followed by the inline code. In E-Prime 1 this worked fine, but E-Prime 2 never registers the first pressing of the space bar, and often fails to register several pressings of the space bar before finally playing the sound.

The sound files that the soundout object uses are all .wav files, 16-bit, 44.1kHZ. They are only 87kb in size.

I am using a Windows 7 machine. While searching for solutions I have seen on some old threads (circa 2010) that early versions of E-Prime 2 basically don't work with Windows 7 / Vista. Is this still the case? Are there any tips people can give me to get E-Prime 2 to run audio more consistently with Win7?

Thanks
Rob

[David McFarlane]

Rob,

You present three issues going on here, all related to the port from
EP1 to EP2: 1) erratic sound output; 2) erratic input from space
bar; 3) status of EP2 vs. Windows Vista/7.

I will address only the third: Starting with EP2.0.10.242, E-Prime
seems to work fine with Vista & 7, in fact in my experience EP2 under
Vista/7 works better than any other combination.

Beyond that, if it were me I might try rebuilding the program from
scratch in EP2 (instead of porting from EP1), just so that the new
program uses all the new default settings. Then again, some tricks
in EP1 programs will not work with the default settings in EP2.

Finally, you might also try contacting PST Support. Good luck.

-----
David McFarlane
E-Prime training
online: http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster)

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