adding sound to Rails app

rubyonrails-talk
1

I need to add some simple sounds to my latest app. Basically, ‘beep’ and ‘burp’. Google hasn’t been much help. I’d appreciate any recommendations.

Thanks,

Bill

2

Bill -

3

Bill -

I need to add some simple sounds to my latest app. Basically,
'beep' and 'burp'. Google hasn't been much help. I'd appreciate
any recommendations.

Thanks, Bill

scriptaculous also has a simple sound thingy (GitHub - madrobby/scriptaculous: script.aculo.us is an open-source JavaScript framework for visual effects and interface behaviours. )

Fred

4

Hi Fred,

Frederick Cheung wrote:

> scriptaculous also has a simple sound thingy

(GitHub - madrobby/scriptaculous: script.aculo.us is an open-source JavaScript framework for visual effects and interface behaviours.

)

Thanks. I found that a bit after my initial plea and grabbed sound.js. I'm having a really wierd problem with it though. I call Sound.play(good_sound) or Sound.play(bad_sound) depending on whether or not an item is found. First time it works correctly, playing the correct sound. Second time, it plays the last sound, then the correct sound. Works that way from then on. I'm logging the calls to Sound.play and it's only getting called once per request/response. But the sound's getting played twice. I've scratched my head raw. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks, Bill

5

sounds like you have to load the sound first to play it?... i'd be looking at the sequence of events from the time it's first triggered, and in what order the sound is loaded... the way i'd approach this would to call a function which first loads the correct sound and then plays it...

def play_correct_sound(input_value)   if input_value = 'good'     correct_sound = good_sound   else     correct_sound = bad_sound   end   Sound.play(correct_sound) end

I could be wrong though...

6

Hi Nellboy,

Nellboy wrote:

i'd be looking at the sequence of events from the time it's first triggered, and in what order the sound is loaded...

I'm not sure what you mean by 'order the sound is loaded'. Order relative to what? I'm looking at the js execution in FF. The double dinging is intermittent now and I haven't been able to isolate the cause yet. When it starts, though, it can be replicated. What's really wierd is that I can put a breakpoint at the beginning of the Sound.play function and the app dings before it ever gets there. Then it dings again at the expected point within the function.

the way i'd approach this would to call a function which first loads the correct sound and then plays it...

Thanks much for the suggestion. It's helped. I just pulled the url string out of the call to Sound.play and replaced it with a variable to which I'd just assigned the string. The problem still happens, but not as much.

Any other ideas are very, very welcome.

Thanks, Bill

7

You do add the {replace: true} option right?

if (!(typeof Sound == ‘undefined’)) {

Sound.play(‘/sounds/’+somestring+‘.mp3’, {replace: true});

}

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

8

no problem Bill... The solution is just to keep playing with it, and recoding it in different ways until it works... if my suggestion helped, then I think it probably has got something to do with the way the Sound.play function is executing... from what you say, i suspect that it's not clearing the previous sound out of cache before loading the next one - I've seen something like that before but not in Rails... you could try something like this to see if that's the case:

def play_correct_sound(input_value)   if input_value = 'good'     correct_sound = good_sound   elsif input_value = 'bad'     correct_sound = bad_sound   else     correct_sound = nil   end   Sound.play(correct_sound) end

good luck

9

actually, on second thoughts, Peter's solution looks much better

10

Hi Peter,

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I wanted to make sure of my facts re: your first question.

You do add the {replace: true} option right?

if (!(typeof Sound == 'undefined')) {    Sound.play('/sounds/'+somestring+'.mp3', {replace: true}); }

I'm making the call to Sound.play in an RJS view, so the code looks a little different. As an example...

right_sound = "sounds/item_deleted.wav" page.call "Sound.play", right_sound, true

It took some experiementation to figure out that the last argument to page.call needed to be the constant and not some string. I double checked today and modifying the call leads to bad results re: the value of 'replace'. The code above gives the best results I've achieved so far. But I'm getting very different results depending on whether I'm running the RoR stack locally on windows vs. on a shared (linux) host. I'm also getting different results on the hosted system depending on whether I'm running my browser on windows or linux. It's pretty solid running the RoR stack locally, along with the browser (FF) on windows. Running RoR on a shared linux host with browser on Windows is worse. With browser on Linux...

I've got 3 sounds and 3 .wav files: beep, burp, and swoosh. burp and swoosh are both 3KB files. beep is 121KB. Running my browser on Linux, I only hear the beep (sometimes a two-fer). I went onto the server and copied beep.wav over burp.wav. Now i can hear burp (although it's beep, of course). Change back to the original burp file and the sound disappears.

I've stepped through the js and the code is only getting called once. But once it starts 'bouncing', the sound is produced before the library function's first line gets executed. I'm at a loss as to where to look for the problem. Any direction / suggestions will be very much appreciated.

TIA, Bill