Variable audio time delays between songs

[radioguy1007]

Last season a problem with S2 was variable audio delays between sequences in a show. I wrote about it then, and a few others responded saying they also had seen this too at that time. It kept me from converting to S2 for last year. Well, this year I had to jump (the new features in S2 are just too good to pass up), but I've noticed doing dry show runs that I can still see the random delays are there. My show has a lot of little voice sound bites (3 to 10 seconds in length) in between songs in my shows, and the random 2 to 4 second delays make the talk sound very unnatural. With S1 things always sounded very smooth - I never heard any pauses. The delays are very apparent when the status logs are viewed. You can see a 2 or 3 second difference between the ending musical and the starting musical times. When it "clicks", the ending time is the exact same second as the starting time of the next sequence. The big problem is that the delays are not consistent with each time the show runs - they vary and move around.

I've tried running on 3 machines - my main show controller is a dedicated 1G Pentium that has XP SP3 on it and is CLEAN (no other programs on it other than the OS and S2). I also have the same issues on my laptop and office machine (much faster CPU's) where I do my sequencing (but can dry run shows there).

Does anyone have an idea as to what I can do to try and get this running smooth? I did a search of the site and there seem to be no other mentions of it this year on S2. Either that or I am not using the right search terms.

Thanks,

Mike

[George Simmons]

Mike,

Have you taken a look at the sequences themselves? I had what sounds like a similar problem last year and when I went back to examine each sequence, many of them had too much time on the end, especially songs that faded out. A couple even had a bit too much time at the beginning. (I like having a second of lead time before the music and/or first lighting event begins) I used Audacity to eliminate the excess time at the start - along with having to skew tracks to compensate - and used the "change total time" command in the sequence editor to remove the excess slop at the end of the songs. Problem solved for me...

[radioguy1007]

George:

I use a program called Sound Forge to do my audio editing. I have EXACTLY 0.2 seconds of silence in front of the song or voice, and exactly 0.5 seconds of silence at the end of the sound files. The issue is that the log file shows a sequence will end at like 10:43:23, then the next one on the log will show a start of 10:43:26 (3 seconds between - why?). The real problem is that one time through the show they will be there, the next time through the pauses move to somewhere else. I'm fairly confident it is not the files themselves. The majority of them were the same as I ran with S1 last season (except upconverted, of course).

Mike

[bwaldrep]

There is a recent thread about delays between songs, and from what I remember, the issue was blamed on the time Windows Media player, and maybe even LOR took to "load" up the next song.

This theory would follow the random times you see, as the computer may move faster one minute, and slower the next.

I'm not a windows guy, so I can't comment any further then what others have said.

[George Simmons]

bwaldrep wrote:

There is a recent thread about delays between songs, and from what I remember, the issue was blamed on the time Windows Media player, and maybe even LOR took to "load" up the next song.

Now that you mention it, I seem to remember a thread along those same lines in which someone suggested that it might be an issue the first time through a show as all the sequences are racked up (or whatever the radio term is), but then subsequent times through the same playlist during the same show that wouldn't happen any more.

[radioguy1007]

I guess I have a hard time blaming this totally on winblows. As I had said, I tried S2 last fall and had the timing issue, then went back to S1 because of it for last season. So media player was the same in both cases last year.

And I can say that going through the "second time" is not it either - the delays will not happen at the same points in the show, which is the strange part. I looked at that last night on the status logs.

Mike

[bob]

The media player was not necessarily the same in LOR 1 and LOR 2. Many versions of LOR 1 used Windows Media Player 6, which is a very, very different thing than subsequent versions of Windows Media Player (which LOR 2 uses).

I'm not sure I fully understand the part where you speak about the contents of the logs. Could you please post a copy, or send it to me (bob@lightorama.com), and point out exactly what portions of it you find surprising? Thanks.

[radioguy1007]

Bob:

Here is a sample log of what I am experiencing:

3:03:15 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Tell Friends JT.lms
3:03:21 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Tell Friends JT.lms
3:03:21 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Holly Jolly Christmas.lms
3:03:26 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Holly Jolly Christmas.lms
3:03:26 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesHolly Jolly Christmas 2009.lms
3:05:38 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesHolly Jolly Christmas 2009.lms
3:05:41 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Feliz Navidad.lms
3:05:45 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Feliz Navidad.lms
3:05:45 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesFeliz Navidad Edit 2009.lms
3:07:55 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesFeliz Navidad Edit 2009.lms
3:07:57 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Lights of the Season.lms
3:08:01 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Lights of the Season.lms
3:08:02 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Jingo Jango.lms
3:08:07 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Jingo Jango.lms
3:08:07 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesJingo 2009.lms
3:10:18 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesJingo 2009.lms
3:10:20 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Jamestown Lights.lms
3:10:24 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Jamestown Lights.lms
3:10:24 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Wonderful Christmas Time 2.lms

In this sample the issue showed up at 5:38 to 5:41, 7:55 to 7:57, 10:18 to 10:20. Any time a one second difference is seen there is no issue.

Now for run 2 (same portion of show):

3:15:16 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Tell Friends JT.lms
3:15:22 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Tell Friends JT.lms
3:15:23 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Holly Jolly Christmas.lms
3:15:27 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Holly Jolly Christmas.lms
3:15:28 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesHolly Jolly Christmas 2009.lms
3:17:40 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesHolly Jolly Christmas 2009.lms
3:17:41 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Feliz Navidad.lms
3:17:45 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Feliz Navidad.lms
3:17:46 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesFeliz Navidad Edit 2009.lms
3:19:55 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesFeliz Navidad Edit 2009.lms
3:19:57 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Lights of the Season.lms
3:20:01 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Lights of the Season.lms
3:20:01 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Jingo Jango.lms
3:20:06 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Jingo Jango.lms
3:20:07 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesJingo 2009.lms
3:22:18 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesJingo 2009.lms
3:22:19 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Jamestown Lights.lms
3:22:23 PM: Ending Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner 885 Jamestown Lights.lms
3:22:24 PM: Starting Musical: C:Program FilesLight-O-RamaSequencesLiner Wonderful Christmas Time 2.lms

This time the delay only happened at 19:55 to 19:57. These pauses move around - may or may not be there from run to run. When you have voice it is very noticable as it causes an unnatural pause in the speaking.

I hope this makes it a bit more clear as to what I am seeing.

Mike

[bob]

There are several things that we might do before issuing the "Starting" log message. There are a few that strike me as possibly taking significant time. All but one of these strike me as unlikely, though.

Most of the unlikely ones are all things like "If the sequence uses X10 controllers, and we haven't yet initialized the X10 network, initialize it now". Same with the Dasher network, and the LOR networks. I think these are unlikely because even if you use controllers of those particular types, we probably would have already initialized the appropriate networks due to a prior sequence, and so we wouldn't be trying to initialize them again.

The other unlikely one is that if we haven't already loaded the sequence from disk, we load it. This strikes me as more likely than the "initialize network" types, but still not very likely, because I assume that these sequences, being very short, are also very small files, and shouldn't take a significant amount of time to load. The possible exception here would be if your computer is doing something else at the time, and Windows simply doesn't give LOR enough resources at that moment to load the file quickly. If this is the case, I'm not sure that there's much we can do about it, except for perhaps trying to strip your computer of anything else that it might be doing.

The one that strikes me as most likely is that if it's a musical sequence, we tell Windows Media Player about the associated media file, set various WMP options for the song, and then tell WMP to play it.

Only after WMP has finished whatever setup it does when asked to play a song, and gives control back to LOR, do we issue that "Starting" log message.

I would suggest making sure that you have the latest version of Windows Media Player, and perhaps using Windows Update to make sure that you have the latest of all other Windows components.

If this doesn't help, we could at least get you a special version of the program that puts out more log messages, so that we can tell exactly where the time is being spent (such as if it's being spent in WMP, or in us loading the file, or in us initializing a network, et cetera). Please send me an email (bob@lightorama.com) if you are interested in doing this.

In any case, I'm not sure if this would work with what you have in mind or not, but have you considered using an audio editor to amalgamate consecutive short audio files into larger files? Like having a "conversation" audio file instead of a bunch of individual files each representing one little part of the conversation, or something like that? I don't know exactly what you're trying to do, but I gather that the issue is that the pause makes the speech sound unnatural; perhaps there's a way to slap them together appropriately such that the pauses (if any) would only come at less unnatural spots.

[radioguy1007]

Bob:

Thanks for some of the possible explanations. I'll send an email so we can discuss this further.

As to why I do the short vocal things, I like to change up the way the show sounds a bit from time to time, and it is amazing how different two parts of speech can sound. A couple examples:

"You're watching the lights on Jamestown's eight eight point five" "Now here's Paul McCartney with Wonderful Christmas Time"

Change the first part and you get:

"Please dim your headlights while viewing the show" "Now here's Paul McCartney with Wonderful Christmas Time"

Same voicers, but sound completely different. With 0.7 seconds between files (edited in the sound file 0.2 second lead in and 0.5 second lead out) it sounds very natural. Put 3 seconds inbetween there, well.....

Mike