#6513 NORM Never A: Sound clip management

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#6513: Sound clip management
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 Reporter:  lukego           |       Owner:  lukego        
     Type:  defect           |      Status:  new           
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
Component:  epaati-activity  |     Version:                
 Keywords:                   |    Verified:  0             
 Blocking:                   |   Blockedby:                
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 We don't have an exact system for managing sound clips, but we should.

 There are a lot of common sound clips shared between activities, for
 example the speech samples for 'right' and 'wrong' and small numbers.
 Currently some of these samples are being preloaded into the image and
 others are being bundled into project files. (The bundling happens
 automatically when the project contains a script that references a sound
 clip with 'make sound').

 The problems with the current approach are:
 1. Wasting space if the same clip is bundled into many project files.
 2. It's difficult to "globally" replace a sound clip that's used in many
 projects (e.g. if we want to rerecord for better quality).
 3. Sometimes we have errors where a project tries to use a soundclip that
 doesn't exist. This happens if the soundclip is referenced by name in
 Smalltalk code ("self beep: 'myclip'" -- no automatic bundling into the
 project) but has not been preloaded into the image  (an error-prone manual
 process).

 So we need a good system that removes all of these!

 One idea we discussed was to have a sound/ directory containing all the
 sound clips in named files (right.wav, wrong.wav, etc). We would not
 include these clips in the image or in project files. Instead Morph>>beep:
 would load the clips from files on demand. That part should be easy, so
 long as loading is fast enough. Then the tricky but doable part is hacking
 project saving so that the clips aren't unnecessarily saved in the project
 files.

 But that one's just an idea and there may be a better solution.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6513>
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