FAQ

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Frequently Asked Questions

     Navigation
     Analysis
     Graphing
     Releases
     Other
     Troubleshooting


     NAVIGATION

     I would prefer to zoom in and out and slide instead of slicing up the sound file.
     That is perfectly feasable. Sectioning was used at the begining as a simple solution for RAM limitations and navigation speed during the analyses. Since it is not great but it works, this matter did not make it to the top of the priority list yet. It should not take long, however.

     What is that black screen that comes up when I am opening Sound Ruler?
     That screen displays code warnings and errors. When things do not work as they should, please paste the contents of the black screen into your bug report.

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     ANALYSIS

     How do I erase the green bars when I make a wrong click?
     There is no "erase" button. Click on the number of the current section or call in the Sections or Calls list. The graph will the reset, erasing all the green bars.

     Is it possible to make the program plot the oscillogram of the call with a constant duration (for graphs and CCA)?
     Why does the program exceed the green bars that I define when I perform manual recognition in the section?
     SoundRuler provides control over the amount of sound that is added around the call that is recognized in the section. The area "Plot: time displayed around the call" in the menu Options, Section defines how much sound is incorporated in the next graph.
     To make the program follow your manual "green bar" selections exactly, select "centered","percentage" and 100 %.
     To make it select a constant total duration, select "centered","milliseconds" and specify a duration. The program will select the desired duration, centering it among the green bars in manual selection or the blue gate in automatic recognition.

     Why doesn't Sound Ruler measure variable xyz?
     Please let me know if variable xyz is important in your work. The implementation of measuring it may be very simple and it might just not have occurred to me to incorporate it.

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     GRAPHING

     I want to edit my figures by dragging and dropping with the mouse.
     Yes, me too. But the matlab libraries that the stand-alone versions use do not support drag-and-drop yet. The libraries included in Matlab itself, however, do support drag-and-drop, so if you have Matlab you can drag-and-drop in the script versions of SoundRuler.

     Why doesn't Sound Ruler save my spectrograms as Adobe Illustrator or Windows metafiles?
     (It looks like it is saving now, or at least copying and pasting, but we still need to test more systems).
     Those formats are vectorial, meaning that the image is defined as a series of geometric objects on a coordinates map.
Spectrograms are generated as bitmaps, where the pixel darkness is specified point by point. It is strait-forward to convert from vectorial images to bitmaps but the opposite is complicated, especially when the image presents complex gradients of gray.

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     RELEASES

     What releases of Sound Ruler are available?
     Sound Ruler is released as stand alone binaries or as Matlab scripts. The binary versions are quicker and lighter than the scripts and do not require Matlab. The scripts are easier to modify and for now they have some extra plot editing features. Both script and binary versions are available for Windows and Linux. The Mac version is not out yet.
     soundruler-x.x.x.windows.zip: Windows stand alone binaries.
     soundruler-x.x.x.windows.scripts.zip
: This is the source M-file script version for use within Matlab 6.x. They should not take much adjustment to run on older Matlab versions or other operational systems.
     soundruler-x.x.x.linux.rpm
: Linux stand alone binaries.
     soundruler-x.x.x.linux.tar.gz
: Linux generic installation source file.
     soundruler-x.x.x.linux.scripts.tar.gz
: This is the source M-file script version for use within Matlab 6.x.

     Where are the source files? What language is used to write Sound Ruler?
     Sound Ruler is developed in M-file scripts. These are implemented by Octave (open, free) and Matlab (proprietary). The source files are in the script releases.

     Where are the Mac OS X binaries?
     They are not out yet. If you have Matlab for OS X and Matlab, you can use the M-file script version (smaller adjustments migh be needed).

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     OTHER

     Some features in the help file seem to be missing from my version of SoundRuler.
     We are dealing with four types of releases that all run on different libraries. It is not currently possible to have all features present and identical in all releases.

     Does Sound Ruler run in Octave?
     The graphical interface that Sound Ruler uses is not yet available in Octave. But you can adapt its functionality to the console, and use GnuPlot to generate the graphs. Take a look at how I did it in Listener, an automated acoustic monitoring system.

     Can Sound Ruler coexist with Matlab installations?
     If the Matlab version is the same as the libraries that ship with SoundRuler, you do not need to install the libraries. If they are not the same version, you just have to make sure that the call to SoundRuler's folder in your path appears before the call to Matlab's folder and both should work fine.

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     TROUBLESHOOTING

     "A required .dll file, libmmfile.dll, was not found".
     "Sorry, the configuration of the path failed".

     For some reason the installer failed to setup the path. All we need to do is to inform Windows where the mathematical libraries are.

     In Windows98 or Windows95: Find the file c:\autoexec.bat. If it does not exist, create it. Edit or add the line that starts with "SET PATH=" and include the call C:\MyFolder\soundruler\bin\win32; replacing C and MyFolder with the drive and folder where you installed SoundRuler. (see bottom - FOR ALL).

      In Windows2000/NT: Go to Start - Settings - Control_Panel - System. A window will open with several tabs on top. Choose Advanced and at the bottom, click on "Environmental Variables". A screen will open with two boxes. The lower one, "System variables" , has an item called "Path". All that needs to be done is to click on "Path" and click the Edit button to add the path to the mathematical libraries. However, the Edit button might not be available, if your username does not have administrative power. If that is the case, log off Windows and log back on as Administrator. When you click the Edit button, a little window will open with two fieds. The lower one "Variable value" is where you want to add c:\program files\soundruler\bin\win32; You might have to change "c:\program files\soundruler" to point to the folder where you installed SoundRuler if you did not use the default.

     FOR ALL: if you have Matlab installed, place the new call into your path BEFORE the call for Matlab's folder. This should not affect Matlab. Now reboot the computer and SoundRuler should work fine. In case it doesn't, there might be a typo in the path. You can easily check on in by opening a DOS prompt (Start-Run and enter "command" or "cmd") and entering "path". It will display something like:
          
PATH=C:\Windows\system32;c:\program files\soundruler\bin\win32;

     My settings files stoped working.
     Settings files are sensitive to sampling rate. To use them with a new sampling rate, you might have to change all the settings that are based on sample number. I might come up with some automatic converter....

     "The ordinal #### could not be located in the dynamic-link library dforrt.dll".
     This is a problem with the installation of Matlab's libraries. Here is the solution from the Mathworks: locate dforrt.dll or deformd.dll in your Windows system directory and replace them with the corresponding files in the <soundruler>\bin\win32 directory, where <soundruler> is the name of your SoundRuler installation directory.

     Sound is poor or absent in the Linux versions.
     The implementation of sound in the Linux libraries is still precarious. The result seems to depend both on hardware and software so it might be worth trying another machine.

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