April | 2014 | Thomas' Work Space

Our tutorplayer installation which comes with Sanako study 1200 tutor on the teacher computer is broken

2014/04/04 plagwitz Leave a comment

What’s with the non-existent path hard-coded here? Missing path delimiter? But that is not enoguh to fix the path: There is a student.settings in C:\ProgramData\Sanako\Study\Student\Tutor.Settings – not sure why tutorplayer is not accessing this file.
Which is double annoying since I just had to enable MFF as default recording save format for some teachers that need dual track support which is buggy with MP3.

Categories: audience-is-vendors, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Glitches&Errors, service-is-documenting, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags: sanako-study-1200, tutorplayer.exe

No usable dual track audio from Sanako Study 1200 version 7 when saving as MP3?

2014/04/04 plagwitz Leave a comment

We have not been using the dual track recording capabilities of the Sanako much here yet, or have relied on the diachronic separation of channels that the Sanako voice-insert mode provides. Now, however, we want to apply the Sanako to consecutive interpreting in our MA program where there is more of a need for the reviewing student/grading teacher to switch between source and target language on the recorded dual-track audio.
As far as I remember, dual track recording, one of the core features of the digital audio lab, used to work out of the box in Sanako (up to version 5 on XP?), but to my surprise, no more when I saved a student exercise, the left and right channel were identical (and the source and interpreter voices very hard to separate, the entire interpretation impossible to follow).
1. I had noticed before that with version 7 (at least, we skipped 6) all recording was dual channel, but simply duplicated the left and right audio channel (isn’t this a waste of bandwidth and storage resources?).
I tested our 7.1 installation (on Windows 7 64-bit), by changing the advanced collection settings, for an interpreting audio file, clapping from the teacher station:
First I changed the tracks to be saved:
Test1: .This mixes student and program down onto each channel:
Test 2: , Program track only, as expected (no clapping)
Test 3: Student track, as expected (only clapping – pretty much)
Workaround: After trying whether I can save manually from the student station, it occurred to me to change the file format also
1. WMA:
  1. dual track
    1. works with “Save AS” from the student.exe (where the mp# options is conspicuously absent, or am I missing something):
    2. won’t work with “collect” from the tutor.exe: both tracks (saving both is – fortunately – only an option for “save as“ WMA from the student exe. You can also save only the student track as WMA) get mixed down to one (and the student is far too soft) , as you can witness here:
  2. WMA is a technically nice, efficient (small file size) and widely supported format, but does require an add-on installation on the MacOS X, not to mention mobile devices.
  3. WMA on Windows plays in Windows Media Player, but from version 12, Windows Media Player has no easy way to adjust the balance anymore, you have to dig relatively deeply into the OS (mmsys.cpl) itself.
2. MFF:
  1. dual track works ~~also~~ (saving single track is actually not an option in this format)both using
    1. the student recorder “Save as” (which can also mix both tracks, see above)
    2. “collect” from the tutor.exe: you can fade in the left and right channel with the balance tool that you find in the student recorder to the left of the timeline.
  2. Unfortunately,
    1. MFF is a proprietary format, which only the Sanako recorder can play. This may be a nice way to get more adoption of the free Sanako student recorder which is great for language learning. However, I had not originally planned on forcing my users to use it who are most comfortable with mp3.
3. In addition, I now have a the problem with how to switch the Sanako default collection to MFF for interpreting teachers without confusing regular users.

Categories: audience-is-vendors, Interpreting, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags: audio, dual-track, sanako-study-1200, student.exe, tutor.exe

Manage some of your teacher computer settings per logged in user

2014/04/03 plagwitz Leave a comment

Another day, another hack, and inconsequential, unless of course you are in my situation:
If you need a simple way to change some of your Sanako settings per logged in user
but cannot use the logged-in user system built into Sanako Study 1200:

$path = "C:\ProgramData\Sanako\Study\Tutor\"


If (@UserName = "PRTOTECTTHEINNOCENT") Then	

; change the sanako default save to dual track supporting mff

	; prereq: customized settings files in the folder ready to rename 

	FileCopy($path & "mffTutor.Settings", $path & "Tutor.Settings", 1)

ElseIf (@UserName = "tplagwit") Then 

; change the sanako default save to dual track supporting wma, for testing

	FileCopy($path & "wmaTutor.Settings", $path & "Tutor.Settings", 1)

Else 

; keep the default mp3, but we may have to reset the tutorsettings on this unfrozen computer

	FileCopy($path & "mp3Tutor.Settings", $path & "Tutor.Settings", 1)

EndIf

; tutor.exe could be hardcoded to (re)load here

If ProcessExists("Tutor.exe") Then

	; determine: we could kill tutor to reload it, but that could be disruptive of a class

Else

	Run("C:\Program Files (x86)\SANAKO\Study\Tutor\Tutor.exe")

EndIf

Exit

Categories: digital-audio-lab, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-programming, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, sourcecode Tags: audio, autoit, dual-track, mff, sanako-study-1200, tutor.settings, wma

More disruptive recommendations to downgrade to colorscheme basic on lab PCs despite Themeswitcher?

2014/04/03 plagwitz Leave a comment

Is this maybe what happens when Themeswitcher crashes: While the desktop background still gets changed, the Colorscheme does not get set to Basic? How to avoid the crashing FileIOException? What fileIO may a colorscheme change require?
Disruption is the least of the problem: The warning comes up when computers become dangerously slow. In the past, they have become disfunctional during these episodues and needed to be power-cycled. This has resulted in loss of assignment and assessment materials.