dpletts

Hi John, An excellent explanation of audio in version 6.5. Thank you for the hard work. May I just mention that if you place a second or subsequent sound on a track that already has a sound placed on it, the 'offset' time refers to the gap between the end of one sound and the start of the next sound rather than the offset from the start of the project, which only applies to the first sound on a track. Putting extra, offset, sounds on a different track, as shown in the tutorial, makes it much easier to handle the offset. As you can't use the crossfade effect in this situation, you may have to engineer your own crossfades simply by setting fadein and fadeout times for each sound. Of course, if you are simply adding another sound immediately after an existing one on the same track, crossfade becomes very useful. Its a bit late in the evening for me, so I hope this is understandable. Cheers, David P

No photographs in this one, just animated abstract shapes to accompany my ambient soundtrack. Download here David P

Hi Ivor, I use PTE because having looked at other slide-show software I found it 1 easy to use 2 has excellent animation features 3 gives brilliant output - I only use the .exe output so can't comment personally on other output formats, but from what I have read .exe is the best anyway 4 has excellent audio features 5 is constantly being updated - both the odd bug-fix and new features 6 has a very supportive forum 7 lots of excellent examples are available to view via the forum and other sites on the internet 8 has never crashed out on me 9 is usable on a computer with a fairly modest specification 10 can be used for more than simple slide-shows, eg pure animation, front end for running other software, presentations, teaching etc, ie very versatile 11 fun to use Hope that helps, David P

Hi Jeff, I really liked this show. We see nothing like this around here (East Anglia, UK). I particularly liked the textural quality of your photos - and the music. Regards, David P

Eric, Just brilliant; loved it. Good to see something different, and to some, maybe, challenging. More, please. Dare I comment on the choice of music? Cheers, David P

Here is a very short example of what I had in mind. The slides are longer than I would normally use so as to give a better impression of the background rotation. As you can see, it is possible to achieve the effect using available features, but I believe it would be a lot easier to be able to set up the rotating background in one go to last for the duration of the show. Download here. David P

I have seen this slow-moving effect used in a TV program and thought a basic rotation version could perhaps be incorporated in P2E for any end-use. I only use the .exe option but I would like the background rotation as an option. I have, for example, made a family slide show from scanned photographs; some don't enlarge too well, many are potrait format and there are some collages with spaces between the pictures. Although I added some static backgrounds to the slides I feel it would enhance the show and give it some cohesion if there was the same animated (abstract) background to each slide. The option would need at least two parameters: 1) Option to scale the picture so that it could be rotated without seeing the edges, and 2) a plus or minus number to indicate the speed of rotation (negative for counter-clockwise) - perhaps on the scale of 1 to 100 with 1 being VERY slow and 100 being slow. Cheers, David P

No problem, Eric. I just happen to have both those pieces in my cassette/cd collection. I am terrible at remembering or making a note of where on the internet I have 'borrowed' something. Best wishes, David

Hi Eric, Just to show that I watched your excellent slideshow to the end (I've only visited once - but it's such an atmospheric place), I hope you don't mind me pointing out that the first piece of music is actually called Sadeness by the group Enigma, and the final piece (Pie Jesu) is by Gabriel Faure and comes from his Requiem. Doesn't spoil the show, though. Regards, David P

Well, Peter, I happened to notice (recently) that sometimes on TV if a still image was being shown, there was a gently moving shape in the background. Not only did I not find it distracting, but was rather attracted by the idea as it seemed to bring an otherwise static screen to life a bit. So, as a slowly revolving image is probably the closest that P2E can get to a moving shape with a minimum of effort I wondered if it could be offered as an option. Mind you, just because it's used on TV doesn't necessarily mean its a good thing and P2E does offer other alternatives to having a static screen through the already available animation functions. Best wishes, David

Would it be useful to be able to select a picture or design for the background to the whole project via Project Options/Background and have it rotate clockwise or counterclockwise at a user-selected speed? I am thinking of people who need to use small pictures and/or collages and/or portrait format pictures. David P

Hi Mick, Thanks for your kind comments and for your insight into the unintentional 'hook'. David

Another show of pictures to accompany a piece of ambient music I put together. Nearly all the pictures have been manipulated with various graphic applications resulting in a lot of abstract images. The 'scenes' are taken from the internet, the rest of the designs are based on my own photos. The pictures are displayed in random order and auto spread to the music. Wasteland probably has only minority appeal Download here. David P

A really moody piece with the occasional audio/visual surprise. Excellent, I loved it. David P

Twenty years ago I visited Russia, Moscow to be precise. Unfortunately I no longer have any photos of the trip, so I decided to grab some pictures from the internet. For me, and hopefully for you, they invoke the Spirit of Russia. David P

Thanks for that, Ken. David

Hi, If I make a slideshow which includes pictures downloaded from the internet via Google/images am I in trouble if I make it available via this forum? David P

For those of you who might be put off by my recent 'abstract' offerings, this show does actually include real photographs taken by me of various items found around the house and garden. There are also a couple of details from paintings - not by me! Cheers, David P

Here is a trailer for my latest collection of ambient clips. The slideshow can be downloaded from here. The sound pack can be found here. All the sound clips posted via this forum are free for personal or commercial use, and they don't need to be acknowledged. Many of my complete tracks can be downloaded from Soundclick and are also free to use if you wish. David P

Thanks, gentlemen for your considered responses to my problem. However, I have used computers for some 30 years, and have never experienced trying to save a file only to have it deleted. Yes, I've saved files with 0 bytes through my own stupid fault, but never lost a file that way. The mystery remains until I get to the bottom of this (if I can). David P

I have just started putting together a show using Beta 8. The problem is that occasionally when I save the project (I always save under Save As...), it not only doesn't save the project but entirely wipes the previous version of the .pte file. I have not had this problem with earlier versions - is it a bug, or a problem with my system do you think? I have tried saving on two different disks and it happened on both. Did I read about this in a much earlier post? I tried to search the forum but was unable to track it down. At the moment I am saving two copies of the project - just lost one but not the other so it's a random occurance. David P

Well said, Maureen. I am not an expert. I just enjoy making slideshows - for me - and I like to share them, too. I find it a superb way of combining graphics and sound. I wouldn't dream of entering a competition; but then I don't belong to a club, either. Not any! I think Barry's comments provide a good hint as to why. Bye the way, I love seeing the wonderful slideshows members of this forum produce! Thanks to you all. Cheers, David P

Hi Davy, It's a shame that some audio software hasn't incorporated ogg-vorbis compression. My version of Windows Media Player (11) pretends that it can't play files with the extension .ogg, but in reality it can play them. I suspect that a computer needs vorbis.dll and vorbisfile.dll in the system. I can't comment on the Adobe software as I can't afford it and as far as I am aware I can achieve the results I need from the cheap and cheerful software which, out of necessity, I have to use. Two of the main audio software engines, Bass and FMod support ogg-vorbis, so does SDL which I use for my own software. Strangely the latter doesn't support MP3, possibly because of the licensing conditions. Do you think that supplying samples in ogg-vorbis form is a no-no? If so, I won't do it again. In the meantime I have attached the .ogg files converted to mp3 - hopefully it will work. David smokemp3.zip

Hi Davy, Audacity loads and saves .ogg files for editing. I use 1.3 beta (unicode). Someone has put on the net what looks like a new 2010 version, but, as far as I can tell its not. Regards, David P

This is a sort of trailer for a small collection of ambient sound clips. It can be downloaded here. The collection of sound clips include a selection of short (approx 7 secs) clips. These are the files with the .ogg extension. Each file is dedicated to a particular note from the pentatonic scale as denoted by the letter. The number is an indication of the general pitch of the sample. 1 = highest; 2 = lowest. These clips are used for the trailer. Smoke1 to Smoke4 are 2 minutes in duration making use of the shorter clips above. The b suffix indicates that they have had effects applied and some of the deeper frequencies have been filtered out. The numbers again indicate the general pitch. The remainder are just a collection of effects. If these sounds are of interest to you thay may be downloaded (18.03MB) here. David P