goddi

================= Peter, I just sent the email to Igor. I hope he will check into this. I don't have 5.5 anymore. Thanks... Gary

================ Well, I thought of another test: I just selected the "Auto spread slides along music" and ran the Preview. It, too, after about a minute or two, after the slideshow ended, showed the first slide.... This really is driving me crazy. :blink: Do you think if you looked at the PTE in Notepad, that it might reveal something? I looked but I am not sure what to look for. Gary Added later: I just ran a slideshow that I made several months ago. Immediately after the end of the slideshow, the first slide popped up!!! What the heck is going on????????? Maybe I should re-install PTE?????

================= Peter, I did some more testing. I am using the Spanish version that does not have the OGG file, so that it can be eliminated as the cause. This version as only one music file: I selected the "Set End of Last Slide at End of Music". Result was that the problem reoccured. I then replaced the music file with a different mp3 and edited it down to match the original length of 3:46 minutes. I tested it before and after selecting "Set End of Last Slide..." and in both instances, the problem occurred. What is also strange about this problem is that sometimes, the first slide appears within a couple seconds; other times it has occurred after about 2:30 minutes and another time it was about 3:30 minutes. Sometimes, it does not seem to happen at all. It is consistently inconsistent. I am running out of ideas to test.... Gary Added later: Had another idea--repeat Lin's suggestion. I removed the music file. With no music, the last slide appeared in about 1 minute after the show ended.... So can we eliminate music as being the problem???

=========== I did some more testing. The last test where I thought moving the 'End of the last slide' line 3 notches to the left would help...it did not. What is so funny is that the problem does not show up immediately. I thought it was working properly after moving the 'End of the last slide' to the left. I walked out of the room for a short while, came back, and the first slide was on the screen. I tested it again and sat for a while to see what would happen and about a minute or so after the proper ending of the show, it popped up with the first slide again. I just can't see how the music file would do this. Very confused. Gary Added later: I tried another test. I combined the 2 music files into one, using Audacity. That did not help either. Same problem.

================= So now I see how to 'fix' the problem. One way is to delete the last 6 seconds of the sound file. But I don't understand why, if the music file extends past the 'End of the last slide' line, the slideshow would then end with the beginning slide. I usually plop in the music and have the slide evenly spaced out over the music. So this show, where I don't 'Auto spread the slides', is a bit new of a techinque for me. I like it but I see it can have its pitfalls if you are not careful. I wonder if another solution is the always drag the dark green 'End of the last slide line to the far right, which then changes to a lighter green. Is this what most people do to avoid this problem??? Gary Added later: Well, now I am more confused. I went into the file that I had deleted the last 6 seconds of the music file, and dragged the 'End of the last slide' line to the far right to get the bright green line at the end of the timeline. The problem returned.... Added later: Ok, I did a test. I moved the bright green line (that was at the very end of the timeline) to the left by 3 notches. It changed back to the thin dark green line. The problem seems not to be happening. So is the bright green line a 'bad' thing? Still not sure why or what is going on...

================ Lin, attached is a file that shows the new timeline at the end with the red and green lines. Gary Red_line.doc

==================== Lin, You might be on to something! I took out the music and tried many times but could not create the problem. Then, I put the music back, and the problem occurred. I have 2 music files. One, an ogg file, at the beginning, is just a few seconds long. The other music file, about 3:50 minutes, an mp3, has about a 6 second tail of silence at the end of the file, if that helps figure this out. Can you see what is going on here? Thanks... Gary Added later: I removed about 6 seconds from the end of the longer music file. It seems to have fixed the problem. Now I see the "Music End" red vertical line and then after that, then about a half second later, in the timeline, a green vertical line shows at the end. Before, there was not red "Music End" vertical line. Can you explain what this means??? Thanks... Gary

================= Lin... No, I don't want to do that with this show. I normally do spread the slides evenly across the music but now I am going outside my normal envelope... and using the timeline to give more time to some slides, less to others. Is there anywhere else to look at??? Problem is sometimes it ends with the last slide as expected, other times it goes to the first slide at the end of the show. I have attached a screen shot of the Timeline's last slide at the end of the slideshow, if that helps. Gary Timeline.doc

============= Nobeefstu... I am using "When show ends keep last slide in show on screen" and "Sync music and slides." "Time Interval for new slides" is 4 seconds but that does not come into play since I have "Sync music...", right? The last slide does not have any customized settings. By the way, I am using your 'Startup Window' file (Begin v560.zip) that you posted in the Forum back in Feb. I just came across it this week. I embedded the two slides directly into the show itself (not as a 'Run application on exit' as you originally had it), and seems to be working really nice. Thanks. Gary

============ I looked and I don't have it checked. The music does not start...only the first slide appears. Sometimes it appears in a couple seconds, other times, about 10 seconds. Gary

Greetings, I am in the process of creating a PTE show in 5.6.3. In fact, I made 2 shows, mostly identical, but one in Spanish and one in English. They are similar in images and text, except the English show has a couple different initial slides. However, in Preview, (not every time, but many times) both sideshows return to the first slide of each show, even though I have "...keep last slide in show on screen" ticked in both shows. So each show returns to its own first slide, even though both are different first slides. This has happened when I do a Preview and when I play the Exe file. What could be causing this??? I am not touching the keyboard or the mouse. The shows do have the Navigation Bar active. Thanks... Gary Added later... I installed 5.6.4, but it still happens.

================== Ok...if you can't find the file, there is another way of getting it back...maybe. This program, though not free, might do it. At least you can see if it will find it, then you can purchase the program to get the file back" http://www.runtime.org/ Be careful, because they have 2 versions, one for NTFS and one for FAT type of operating system formats. I had to use it and it worked. At least you will be able to find it if it got deleted. Don't do any writing to your hard drive until you run the program so it does not write over that file by accident. Gary PS Which file is missing...the exe or the pte file???

=========================== I am not sure if this will help resolve what had happened. But, I have an antivirus program (SystemSuite) that, if a certain setting is checked, will lock the PTE exe file when I do a Create Exe. I used the 'Unlocker' program to figure out what was actually locking the PTE file: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ If you are running into a similar type of problem, use this program to check it out. It took me a while to figure out how to use it. After you install the program and you have a problem of a file locking, go into MyComputer and right-click on the file that you are having problems with and you will see 'Unlocker' listed in the window. Click on it and it will tell you which program is locking that file. But...you said you have not found it yet.... Just a shot in the dark... Gary

============= Igor, Let me add my thanks for your PTE. You have put FUN back into my photography. Gary

===================== Peter, From my tests, whether you are using a .doc or a .txt file, you have to put in CRs before you copy/paste them into a Text block in order to avoid a single long line of text. The real aggravation is that, if you want to 're-size' the Text block, you have to go line by line and move words around. By 're-size', I don't mean the font size, but I mean the length or number of words in each line in the Text block. The only way around this, I believe, is to have margins in the Text block that would work as it does in any word processing program. Maybe a bit too much for PTE. I was just trying to do something that I would rarely do, and I was a bit stumped. But now I see the light. I originally wanted to have a long vertically scrolling text block...like a story...running with the images as they changed. Being able to make adjustments in the width of the scrolling text would have been much easier if the Text block had the 'margin' capability. I have dropped that idea and went back to short text blurbs. Thanks... Gary

===================== Greetings... Thanks all for the help. But, doing it you as you indicated results in the same problem as just doing a copy/paste into a Text block in O&A. You still get a long line of text. Adding Returns is not the way I wish it would work. The other problem is that using the Comment window with added text puts the text in with any Comment Template that might have been put in, like Slide Number, etc. Wouldn't it be nice if the Text block had 'margins' that would allow us to make the adjustments (as in Word). The problem is if you need to adjust the width of the entire text block, you have to go line by line to redo each line to fit by re-doing the Returns. I guess I have to accept that it does not have this 'wordprocessing' capability. But I did learn about 'Uncle Bob'!!!!!!!!! Thanks.... Gary

============= Not sure what you are referring to. I know how to put text in O&A but I don't follow what you are saying about "an Icon to the right of the text box...". Can you help me out a bit more???? Thanks... Gary PS Who's Bob???

Greetings, I hope there is a way to do this but I can't seem to come up with a good method. I have a lot of text in a Word file that I want to copy/paste into a Text block. When I do this, it becomes one long line in the Text block. It is just about impossible to find the 'handles' of the Text block to resize it. Is there a way to copy/paste a large amount of text from a Word file and be able to find the 'handles' so I can resize it while in the PTE's Text block, so it will word-wrap as I decrease the width of the Text block, as it does in Word when you decrease the margins? Yes, I could re-type it but it is just too much text to deal with. I tried reducing the margins in Word before I copied/pasted it but it still comes out as one long line. Is there a solution??? Thanks... Gary

===================== Greetings, Many years ago when PTE wasn't even invented yet, nor was any slideshow software available on the PC, I came back from a trip to Patagonia with lots of slide film and Hi8 video. I had to set up a slide screen and I took video of the slides as I ran them through the slide projector to incorporate the slides with the video, and I also had to take video of text off the screen that I created on my PC. This was the only way back then to get still images and text incorporated into video without spending zillons of dollars. Really prehistoric, right? One of the slide images was of a fox. I had taken the fox as a still image and then whipped up my video camera (Hi8) and set the same framing and composition and took video as it started to walk around. I still think that was a very cool effect. How much fun would we have doing this with this in PTE????!!!!!! Gary

============== It would have been very interesting to see what would have happened if you were able to merge the MP3s to see if that corrected the problem with the first laptop. Gary PS You must have meant 300-500K?

============= Yachtsman1... I work a bit differently, I guess. I would not compile a sound track until I have edited all of the images and got them into the final sequence. Since I don't use voice overs, the sequence of the images is the most important to start with. I add multiple soundtracks (not merged) while I am doing this just to get the images to be spaced out about 3 seconds (sync'd to music) so I can view them with some proposed music files and see how the images match the 'mood' of the different pieces of music. At the same time, I can be adding/moving/deleting different music files around to help match the images. If the music was compiled into one finished piece, I would not be able to easily move the music files to fit the images while I was editing the show. Sometimes I just re-add the same music piece just to be able to see the images play out in an appropriate time... several seconds each. Once I see that the total time is, say, 15 minutes, then I zero in on the appropriate music to fit in the final length of the show. So this is why it would help me arrange the individual pieces of music if they were numbered/titled in the Slide List and in the Timeline. As I mentioned in the previous posting, I am working on a 1,000+ slideshow with about 8+ music files....22 day trip in Austria. Seeing the music files numbered in the Slide List and the Timeline would really help. Gary

================= LumenLux... As I read your story, the first thing that popped into my head was that you used 'full size files from the camera'. To me, that would have been the cause of the problem of the transitions not showing up as planned. I don't think it would have been using multiple mp3's, as opposed to merging them into one. At least, that has been my experience. I always have first reduced my full camera sized images and they range in size from 100k to 400k each. I currently am working on a 1,000+ image slideshow with about 8 mp3s (not merged). Not having any problems (except that my SystemSuite is still locking the exe file when I do a Create Exe...but that's another problem I am working on). Don't you think it was the full sized images that caused the transition problem??? I have always used multiple mp3's, not merged, with no problems. Gary

================= Yachtsman1... I do use Audacity to 'edit' the music, but not to 'add' music. If I have, let say, 7 classical music pieces in the show and they are so similar, I can not distinguish between them. That makes it difficult to find which one I want to edit down or eliminate because I can't associate them with the beginning and ending slides it plays with. When I look at the Timeline, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find where a particular music piece begins and ends and really know which file it is. I know some people get one piece of music or several and combine them all with Audacity. I like to have more flexibility to do what I do. Usually, I will add several pieces of music just to get 3 or 4 seconds of each image to display. As I add or eliminate images, I may eliminate a music selection or so. It is very hard to figure out which music file is playing with which section of images. So that is why I am hoping the above suggestions can be put into PTE. Gary

======================= Ken, Just so I am clear about this issue, let me ask this question. In the past, I don't believe that I had problems using a beta created pte file in an earlier version. I understand that new menu items or changed menu items of a new version would not function in the earlier versions. But for the entire PTE to get corrupted so it does not work in the previous version, I think, is something new to me. Is this something that Igor just did not attend to yet? I am surprised that no one else seems to have run into this situation. Easy to fix but then you don't want to fiddle around with the beta much when you are actually working on a final slideshow. Gary

================== Ken...That's the problem. When I saved the slideshow in 5.7, I saved it over the file made with 5.6. So now 5.6 will not open the slideshow. I never saw any warning that 5.7 would corrupt the file so it would not work in earlier versions. Thedom... I did not do anything but saved it. I'll give your idea a try. Thanks.. Gary ADDED LATER: Whoopee, it worked. Thanks thedom....