Scratch

Nice, I managed to cut out the converting-to-mono part which is awesome. But maybe it'd be good to have a prompt asking whether I want to convert it or not. (just one of those context menus maybe?) How would I do that?

Thanks so much jvvg! It worked 

I was experimenting in the official 1.4 image so the arguments were named differently but everything went well 

Edit: hmm; I added dialogboxes for both the downsampling and the mono conversion, and it seems to skip the conversion steps. (It doesn't show 'converting to mono...' for example, so I'm guessing it's succeeding.)

However, the sound is still heavily reduced in quality - the result remains the same no matter what I select. It always becomes mono    Any idea? Doesn't Scratch allow stereo playback?

edit2: 'Scratch-Objects > SoundMedia > scratch ops > playFrom:To:' says something about mono    any help would be greatly appreciated.

Seems to be true. The code does seem to support a "pan" or "balance" feature, that would allow you to play a mono sound through only one speaker (or louder through one speaker than through another). If I could turn this into a block somehow, I could just split up my stereo song, and import both 'sides' in Scratch in different sprites.

And 'balance' sound blocks would be awesome for many reasons :p

I did manage to create (balance) and 'set balance to ()'    Everything is already in there, it's quite easy.

At first I wanted to make it exactly like the volume blocks, so I added 'balance _ 50' in scriptablescratchmorph>initialization>initialize, but it refused to save saying 'variable undefined'. Isn't that where you *declare* variables? :S Why does it refuse to do it?

I made it work by having the 'balance' and 'setbalanceto:' methods reference the properties of the actual sound object thing. That's different from the way the volume blocks work but, I could pan sounds across my speakers        

So now I can just import the left and right track separately, play them in different sprites: 1 with balance set to 0, the other with balance set to 100.

They should fix that in Scratch 2.0 

edit: here's a link to what I have now 
http://www.mediafire.com/?zbyt59l9tm8u7ns

Last edited by JSO (2012-02-05 15:43:40)

JSO wrote:

IAt first I wanted to make it exactly like the volume blocks, so I added 'balance _ 50' in scriptablescratchmorph>initialization>initialize, but it refused to save saying 'variable undefined'. Isn't that where you *declare* variables? :S Why does it refuse to do it?

Usually, it offers to declare it as an instance variable for you, but, failing that, you can open another browser on the class (don't select a method or category) and add an item to the "instanceVariables: '...' " section in the editor pane.

JSO wrote:

ah - confusing. why is "instanceVariables: '...'" empty when browsing then?

Sorry, it should look something like this:

ScriptableScratchMorph subclass: #ScratchSpriteMorph
    instanceVariableNames: 'scalePoint rotationDegrees rotationStyle rotatedForm offsetWhenRotated draggable penDown penSize penColor penHue penShade <insert additional space-separated instance vars here>'
    classVariableNames: ''
    poolDictionaries: ''
    category: 'Scratch-Objects'

Change whatever you want about the class, then accept your changes (like you would when editing a method).

Last edited by nXIII (2012-02-05 17:49:08)

JSO wrote:

Oh I see now. Thanks so much for the help! (although it works - would it be useful to give scriptablescratchmorph a balance instance variable?)

The only reason I could see to do this is if you wanted to retain a local volume even if some other object changed the sound's balance.

Also (sorry for being such a source code noob :p) why does squeak change my named local variables to t1 t2 t3 etc when I click accept? fairly annoying actually :S

This is because Squeak is discarding the actual method source (it doesn't have anywhere to put it; you can add a .sources file to fix this) and decompiling the compiled (bytecode) method when you view it.