Common questions and answers about PMsndX. Q. How do I enter the registration information? A. To enter the registration information, pull down the menu from the control panel and select either the Welcome or About menu item. The display will contain a button to bring up the registration display. The information may be entered from the keyboard or from a file. Q. Where is the registration information stored? A. PMsndX stores all of the registration information in the os2.ini file. This amounts to about 100 bytes of data. Q. Why is the executable greater than 500k? A. Duh. The source for this program is about 40000 lines of C++. There is about 100k of icons and graphics that takes up a lot of room because the icons contain versions for each of the different displays (e.g. Independent Color Form (=VGA), Independent Form - (1.2 format), and 8514 - 16 colors). Also, the .RES (resource) file for PMsndX is 230k (which includes the icons and dialog descriptions). The REXX portion of the code takes about 100k and the rest is the dialogs and alogrithms. Q. I have a Sun audio file that plays on my Sun machine but results in a "Unsupported style" error when PMsndX attempts to load it. A. Sun hardware supports U-Law files with and without headers. When a header is not present, the Sun hardware assumes that the sampling rate is 8012 Hz. If a Sun file results in an unsupported style error, force it to load the file in the .ul format and specify a rate of 8012 Hz. Alternately, if the "Require Header for files" is not checked (the default) in the MISC page of the Properties, any file with an extension of .au will be loaded as .ul if a valid .au header is not present. Q. What happens when I try to play a 16 bit sample on an 8 bit sound card? A. PMsndX is capable of editing and manipulating sounds of any number of bits, rate, and channels. However, audio adapters may be limited in their capabilities and may not support multiple some of these characteristics. Therefore, PMsndX will still load and manipulate samples that cannot be played on the audio adapter but the MMPM dialog will disable all of its buttons. If you have an 8 bit audio adapter, go to the AUDIO page of the Properties box and select "Play 16 bits on 8 bit audio" to force PMsndX to play the file. You may notice a significant loss in quality. Q. Why does the PMsndX icon remain hashed after the program has exited? A. Under OS/2 2.11 some programs remain hashed even though they have exited. Future releases of OS/2 may correct this problem. Q. Can compressed VOC files be loaded? A. Unfortunately, I cannot find documentation on the compressed VOC formats and they are not implemented in PMsndX. A future release may have this corrected. Q. I have a file created by sox10. Why can't PMsndX load the file? A. SOX for DOS and OS/2 were ported from the Unix environment. Under DOS and OS/2, as a file is read or written, the data is filtered so that single linefeeds are replaced by carriage return-line feed sequences. Under Unix, this does not occur. As a result, a SOX file cannot be loaded because it has extra characters in the header and body of the data. SOX needs to be recompiled with the file IO system set for binary so that it does not try to filter the data. Q. I want to load a large sample. How do I minimize the memory requirements? A. When a file is loaded it is stored as 16 bit samples regardless of the actual sample size. This takes up roughly twice the memory as would be required for 8 bit samples. When the MMPM dialog is open a second copy of the data is required for the audio adapter. This copy is exactly the size of the data that would be written to disk. If it is an 8 bit sample file, then the samples in the buffer are 8 bits. If it is a 16 bit file, then the buffer contains 16 bit samples. During an editing operation (i.e. cut, paste, or anything in the toolbox) the data is double buffered to allow the operation to be aborted. Finally, when the UNDO capability is enabled from the settings dialog, a copy of the last sample will be maintained for the UNDO. Also, under the edit window, set the checkbox for "Delay AUDIO Loading" so that the editor will not automatically create the AUDIO buffers for a sample. Q. Why doesn't the little man run when the REXX window is minimized? A. If the REXX window is minimized to the Viewer, it will still be animated. However, if it is minimized to the desktop OS/2 does not process the SETICON messages and the icon is not animated. There is nothing I can do about it. Q. When I load a file from the command line, it does not play in PlSndX. A. Check the AUDIO page of the Properties dialog and set "Play on Load" or "Play on commandline load". Without one of these options selected, files are only loaded when specified on the command line and are not immediately played. Q. When I run a REXX script audio files playback starts and then restarts before completing. A. Deseleect the "Play on Load" option on the AUDIO page of the properties dialog. The problem you are having is that the files are played immediately after they are loaded. When the REXX scrip runs into an AUDIO play command, the playback restarts. Q. Why is the REXX syntax defined in a mixture of functions and commands rather than something more consistent? A. REXX functions are necessary whenever PMsndX must return a value to the script but they require a slightly "ugly" format. Subcommands look much nicer but cannot return data to the calling script. if it would aid in consistency, I could make all subcommands into functions too, but it might increase the complexity and confusion. Q. I have a file that will play with PlSndX but will not play with EdSndX. A. PlSndX implements a feature which can automatically resample a file so that it is a multiple of 11025 Hz; however, EdSndX does not implement this feature. The MMPM/2 system for OS/2 performs better when the sampling rate is a multiple of 11025 Hz. EdSndX does not implement this feature because it is intended to be an editor in which the original sample is preserved.