Help! Musid skips all through cd!

[letzel]

Does anyone know why when I record a pics to exe file onto a cd, the music skips just like a scratched record? It plays fine on my pc, which is a Toshiba laptop with 60 gig memory. Just after I record the cd, I go to play it and it sounds awful. I am putting all my wedding images onti cd, adding music and recording it for my brides. I have to make this sound better. Please help!

Thanks, Liz

[Clive Timmons]

Hi Liz,

Do you use Mp3 or wav files ????? if you have too large a file this causes problems for the processor I think doh! there are lots of reasons also if you are viewing the show from the cd it will most likely give you jumps it is recommended by other more knowledgable members to save to hard drive before viewing the show if you give more details as to what settings you use there is bound to be some help good luck with your shows,

keep on Rocking Clive,

.

[Ken Cox]

i think you mean you have 60 gig hard drive but how much ram

does the music sound fine when it is not in the show

do you have anything else running in the background

does it sound ok on a desktop system

you will have to give us more details

ken

[letzel]

I'm not real good with the technical stuff in my computer. Yes it is a 60 gig HD, 512mb of ddr, Pentium 4, 2.4ghz, 32mb ddr nvideo graphics controller. I use mp3 sound files. And the show sounds fine when I play it on the computer, it is just after it is recorded to cd, then that is when the music skips terribly. I tryed the cd in my desktop, it is an older PC, and it still skips just like on the laptop. I did get one cd to come out last week, used different songs (still mp3 files), burned it in Roxio CD Creator, all 3 songs came out beautiful. I still don't understand why it skips, I have reburned the same files over about 5 times, doesn't change it, still skips. I even redid the whole show, using the same music, it still skipped. The bride likes those songs. I do create the slide show and do save it to my HD before recording it. I do not check (use internal wav/mp-3 player), does that matter? My files all over 600mb when completed, and I normally use about 3 songs maximum.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Liz

[JRR]

Liz:

If your file is 600mb (And I assume you mean the .exe file you created when you finished working on the show) it sounds to me like the images are too big and creating too much of a draw on the processor.

So a few thoughts:

1. Did you check the show before you created the .exe file by using the "preview" on the main page ?

2. Your images should be between 100-200kb each. They should be 800x600 pixels or up to 1024x768 pixels saved at about quality 5-6 to give you the 100-200kb size.

3. Did you mix the 3 songs to give you one mp3 file and use custom synch ?

Hope that helps

[nobeefstu]

Liz,

I do not check (use internal wav/mp-3 player), does that matter?

By your comment ... seems your using a older vesion of PTE. Latest PTE version v4.11 no longer requires or uses this setting.

Using this latest version you may find your Show runs better.

However, a 600 mb exe running from a Cd is alot to ask for on older, slower pcs and older, slower cdrom drives ... its all a matter of read speed. Also its a bit much for any pc/cdrom which is also running other background applications .... you would be surprised how many users are unaware of all those extra running items they have going at the same time.

[think(box)]

I too have encountered music skipping, on a 339KB, yes that is KILObytes, show made with MIDI music.

The slightest windows performance demand, like a pop-up menu will cause a skip or note "hold" in the MIDI sound. I have encountered the same problem with MP3 in many other shows, except that MP3 only skips. It doesn't hold a note too long as MIDI does because MP3 sound is not "synthesized" in the sound card.

In all cases I have run the shows from hard drive only (I've worried about what may happen once I load these shows to CD...). I have all other closable applications stopped, and my system is 400MHz P2 512MB memory. Shows made before new music player were totally skip-less and flawless in playback.

[nobeefstu]

Bill

I too have wondered about this new player when launching from CD at runtime :

In all cases I have run the shows from hard drive only (I've worried about what may happen once I load these shows to CD...).

Since PTE no longer extracts its music file to TEMP and solely uses its own player... I wonder if this has any influence on this skip behavior and also when a outside program is being introduced/detected in the overall play of things. So running from a CD may create more issues now ... than encountered with previous versions of PTE

[think(box)]

If you think about the CD drive read speeds, where 10X or more is common, a 10X read speed is delivering a 1.46MB/s data stream. And the CD spin rate is 1200 to 3000RPM for that example, delivering a maximum random access seek time of 100-200ms depending upon laser lens positioner, drive design quality, etc. Comparing to hard drives with constant spin rates of 5400 and 7200RPM commonly, the random access seek time is generally 8 to 10ms avg due to both higher spin rate and super fast read/write head servo.

The image data rate varies, but is generally VERY slow. With one picture every two seconds and 150KB image files, that's 75KB/s and one potentially random CD position access every two seconds. By random I mean that whereever the music data is, it is not likely very near the image data on CD. There isn't any sense in having locality between music and image data (combined stream) unless the show is a "sync" type where it plays like a movie.

The sound data rate varies widely, much more so than the image data rate. For MIDI it will be very little, at about 5KB/s due to the compactness of MIDI synthesizer instructions. For MP3 it will commonly be a steady 12KB/s. For CD audio WAV it is always 172.3KB/s.

Putting all of this together, P2E show coding has to be done using buffers in system memory in order to avoid skipping. The rate of random accesses is once every 1 to 4 seconds for images, so perhaps several images can be stored (if they are not huge BMPs) every time they are read. That's only about a 1MB buffer allocation in memory. The buffer management has to keep from running out during all of the show performance demands. Random image sequence in non-sync shows doesn't work as well in that buffer model.

And for sound, the toughest one, the worst case is WAV format at 172KB/s. Considering the way performance demands go, a good buffer is needed here too. If a 1MB buffer is used, then six seconds of sound are ready to be transfered to the sound card. Unfortunately, the sound card is the best place to have this buffering, but it can not be so in the mix of sound hardware out there. Sound cards have precious little buffering, generally a fraction of a second of sound.

Finally the show processing has to be merged with the image and sound data streams in such a way that both the small-buffer sound card doesn't run out (a high priority buffer service requirement) and the screen bitmap processing doesn't stutter and show a jumpy image dissolve (extreme CPU performance requirement), all while reads have to be serviced from the CD drive.

The management of priorities and queuing is quite a daunting task, given that we want older, slower machines to be able to run our shows. It is tough to provide a smooth dissolve, that will generally max out the CPU on older machines, and allow buffer servicing to interrupt the graphics operations without visible glitches in images. If images are given top priority, then sound will skip. If sound is given top priority then image transitions will be rough.

P2E shows already adjust the dissolve smoothness based upon available machine speed. The new music player built in to v4.11 P2E that doesn't use hard drive temporary sound file storage as in v4.01 and earlier, simply has to more carefully manage sound stream transfer to the sound card during BOTH CD drive sound data access and CPU intensive dissolves. And in between CPU-intensive dissolves P2E has to get as far ahead as possible in filling buffers, computing MP3 data decompression and next image data decompression.

I highlighted the word simply and add that this is anything but simple

Appreciate the genious people at WnSoft

[Mark Lazarz]

I had the same skipping problems with v4.x on a 1.2 GHz machine, 512 meg ram, running Win XP. After resizing all my photos, trying various formats of sound and scrapping a pile of CDs, I reloaded v3.8. Guess what? Problem went away. There is something wrong with v4.x.