On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:37:11 -0400, you wrote: >anyone know how to use sam broadcaster? it's realy good!
If you're asking how to use it, how do you know how good it is? The only thing SAM BC can do that other more accessible packages can't is it's back-ended by SQL technology rather than a home-grown database engine. Otherwise, for the money, Station Playlist does the same thing, but better. I will, though, have to give credit where credit is due. Spacial Audio (and that's not a misspelling for those of you who know that the word "spatial" is spelled with a t) invented a programming language, very geeky and full of lots of tokens and keywords and geeky stuff like that, to control their software, which other products don't seem to have a need for. On the minus side, SAM's event scheduler is an extra-cost program. Now let's talk accessibility. I've been using, or attempting to use, SAM BC since version 2. Along with improvements in their screen layout have come improvements in screenreader technology, so now, SAM BC Version 4 and Window-Eyes V5.5 seem to go together quite nicely. JAWS still has a lot of problems with the Delphi-based screen forms and layouts which W.E. does not. Other than standard menu controls, there is not a single control on the main screen of SAM that either JAWS or Window-Eyes recognizes as a standard windows control. That being said, however, most of what Window-Eyes calls custom controls operate as list boxes, but even with re-classing in JAWS, it's still not right. SAM's category management system needs a little work, too. They give you the ability to have two levels of category, one within another, that is, but they don't allow you to reference a track by using an outer-level category name. For example, I have a category called top40, within which I have three subcategories--artists and albums (which I've abbreviated to A&A), 1hit, and instrumentals. I cannot tell SAM to play me tracks from top40, or even top40.* (standard SQL syntax for a key matching a top-level hierarchy and any sub-level) because the inner categories do not "roll up" into the outer-level one. I've argued this back and forth and forth and back with Louis Louw, Spacial Audio's head programmer, and he says it's coming up in a future version. Another thing that SAM has trouble with is something that's so easy to do in Station Playlist, one wonders why SAM just didn't take the same approach, and that is, marking the intro and outro points for tracks. With Station Playlist, you can move a pointer along a timeline and press a button to hear the marked point in the track, then press another button to lock it into place. With SAM, you have to enter in the exact time in minutes and seconds that you want the points to be stored at. Let me just say here that if there exists in SAM the ability to move a pointer along a time line like there is in SPL, then I haven't found out how to do it yet, but it sure would make things easier and faster, especially with a 50,000-track database. I'm almost to the point where I feel confident enough to use it for a live interactive show, but almost. The sound processing presets that SAM comes with are very good. They've done a lot of work in cleaning up their audio processing over the versions, and now I can honestly say I like it. Their crossfading controls are much easier to use, too. Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
