[comp.sys.mac.system] 6.0.7 Sound Problems

tonyrich@titanic.cs.wisc.edu (Anthony Rich) (10/25/90)

I just installed 6.0.7 on my vanilla Mac II and seem to be having some
sound problems.  I had a "trumpet flourish" as a beep sound before I
installed 6.0.7, and afterwards it wouldn't play -- it caused a bomb every
time *any* program tried to beep.  The only sounds that didn't cause bombs
seemed to be the 4 standard beep sounds that come with the System.
FinderSounds worked okay, though.

Someone here on the net suggested copying sounds to new files using
Sound Mover 1.62, then reopening them using Suitcase II.  That worked; it
made them all playable as beep sounds again, including the trumpet flourish.
Why?  What was changed?

Then I noticed that in the card game Seahaven Towers, the shuffling sounds
are okay, but the "card flicking" sounds are now reduced to silence or just
quiet little pops that sound like those on a dirty record.  I tried
extracting all the sounds with ResEdit, copying them into a new resource
file with Sound Mover 1.62, then repasting them into the game, but that
didn't help.  In fact, it seemed to have changed some of the pops to
complete silence.  They didn't sound right when Sound Mover played them,
either.

Someone from Apple said that 6.0.7 uses the System 7.0 Sound Manager.
Does that mean some old sounds just won't play properly in 6.0.7?
Or is there a way to modify them so they'll still work? Is it just very
short sounds that are affected, or is it a problem with the code that
plays them, rather than a problem with the sounds themselves?
Or am I just hallucinating again?  Can someone shed some light on this?

  -- Tony

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ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) (10/30/90)

In the one case I've come across so far of a "snd " resource refusing
to play under System 6.0.7, I investigated with ResEdit and found
the that the sound header in the resource had garbage values in some
fields. Changing those fields to more sensible values fixed the problem.
The fields were the loop start, loop end, compression encoding and
base note.

Disclaimer: I don't use Suitcase (though I sometimes wish I did...), or
Sound Mover. So I don't know if the fix I described above bears any
connection to the problems other people have been having, or the
fixes for them.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro                       fone: +64-71-562-889
Computer Services Dept                     fax: +64-71-384-066
University of Waikato            electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz
Hamilton, New Zealand    37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+13:00
To someone with a hammer and a screwdriver, every problem looks
like a nail with threads.

baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten) (11/03/90)

In article <2116.272d99f3@waikato.ac.nz>, ldo@waikato (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) writes:
>In the one case I've come across so far of a "snd " resource refusing
>to play under System 6.0.7, I investigated with ResEdit and found
>the that the sound header in the resource had garbage values in some
>fields. Changing those fields to more sensible values fixed the problem.
>The fields were the loop start, loop end, compression encoding and
>base note.
>
>Disclaimer: I don't use Suitcase (though I sometimes wish I did...), or
>Sound Mover. So I don't know if the fix I described above bears any
>connection to the problems other people have been having, or the
>fixes for them.

The description and fix sound exactly right.  I've encountered similar
problems with some of my "snd " resources under 6.0.7.  Worse,
sometimes the sounds just don't play; other times the Mac bombs with
an "unimplemented trap" error.

A solution for those who don't like to fool with ResEdit is to use
Sound Mover (I'm using version 1.61c) and simply copy all the sounds
from one suitcase into a new suitcase.  Sound Mover appears to
normalize "snd " resources that have garbage values in the fields in
question.  The newly copied sounds can then be played successfully
under either 6.0.7 or earlier systems.

This, of course, raises the question of why the code that plays "snd "
resources doesn't first do some sanity checking.  It's great that
Apple spent the time changing their bomb boxes to print semi-English
error messages; however, it would be better if they wrote code that
helped avoid those messages in the first place.

--
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
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   cmcl2!esquire!baumgart       |                           - David Letterman