File Reader basic questions

[Sarah W Bottjer]

1. I am having issues with “File Scrubbing” in File Reader.  When I click on the drawer button (which for me is on the right, not the left) in a 1-hour file, the only timeline (at the bottom) just shows up as a single row of gray boxes (with no vertical lines, possibly because I have no “events”?).  There is no second timeline and also no Start/stop playback button anywhere.  I do see a Pause button (in that line at the bottom of the Viewport), but it just toggles on & off; there is no “play state” that ever shows.  Am I doing something wrong?

2.  Is there a way to see a full filename in File Reader?  It is a little confusing that every data file is named “structure.oebin”.  If I use a custom prepend when I record the data, will that show up when I look at the file in File Reader?

[Pavel Kulik]

Hi Sarah,

1. The left drawer only appears if a recording longer than 30s has been loaded. The right drawer is common across all processors and contains stream information. The row of gray boxes you are referring to represent TTL event lines for the current stream that change color during acquisition based on which lines are receiving events. If you are certain your recording is longer than 30s and the left drawer is still not appearing, please send a link to the smallest data set that reproduces this case to pa...@open-ephys.org.

2. Agreed it's confusing to only have the end of the file path available in FileReader. We've updated this for the upcoming release where hovering over the 'structure.oebin' now shows the full file path.

[Sarah W Bottjer]

Apparently I am losing my mind because when I tried it again the File Scrubber showed up.  I am still a little confused about the Pause button (it toggles on & off but never seems to go to Play) - I assume I will figure it out as I use it on real data. Apologies for the false alarm. 
       an unrelated naive question: I have this sequence in my Signal Chain: [FPGA- BPfilter(300/6K)-RecordNode-LFPViewer]; I assume that will record spikes (continuous voltage signal with no LFP) and that I can export that data to Kilosort. I prefer not to use Spike Detector/Viewer.

[Pavel Kulik]

The pause button is experimental and seems to be more confusing than useful so we plan to remove this as well. I suggest using the sliders instead to start playback at the desired point in the timeline.

Your example signal chain will record the bandpass filtered data which can be loaded into Kilosort for spike detection and sorting.

I also suggest looking into SpikeInterface for helpful tools that streamline the process w Kilosort + OpenEphys data. You can also do the filtering offline instead if you want access to LFP data later on.

https://spikeinterface.readthedocs.io/en/stable/