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Old 09-16-2004, 08:58 PM   #4
JimO'Connor
Mac Development
 
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Join Date: Jul 2002

Location: Kenai, Alaska
Posts: 678
Originally posted by AKcrab
Congrats!
Want to share why you've added this?

Why would one want to control the loop length?
QuickTime can't loop cleanly. The way to make the sound repeat more cleanly is to internally duplciate the sound to lengthen it, which increases the amount of memory the sound takes up (depending on QuickTime's internals). I always tend to conserve memory (my days with an Atari 400 with 16k RAM have permanently disabled me, besides using more memory always has penalties) so I only internally repeat the sound 1 time by default. Then I try to catch QuickTime as it is about to play the last milliseconds of the sound and reset it myself rather than let QuickTime notice it has ended and restart it. On my computers a 15 second loop gives me seamless sound for hours. Even on the 450 MHz G4 Cube the sound is clean. However, a musician user mentioned that he still noticed the loop and he said he'd pronounce a POX on me if I didn't clean it up by the time we shipped. I remember the chicken pox and I don't want to go through that again. So for this user I added the option of increasing the loop length. We'd already frozen the UI and that this isn't the sort of thing many people would want to change so I made it a hidden preference.

I can't promise that everyone will get his own special hidden feature. Sorry.

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