Using Peter Jackson's Audio Widget

The Audio Player Widget is a Commercial Product from Peter Jackson at  ToolBookDeveloper.com.  If you have a book with a lot of audios this is a great solution.  As you might be aware, if you create Audio Clips in ToolBook and use the Catalog Media Players, then upon export ToolBook converts these, sometimes with extremely undesirable results. For instance, you might get something that on a good sound system sounds scratchy.  An alternative is to use the Universal Media Player since all you do with the UMP is to reference the external file and it does not get converted.  Additionally you can play mp3 as well as wav files.  But the problem here is the ActiveX Control.  If you have a lot of UMP's or perhaps want several audio's on one page, you are running the risk of something going wrong.  For instance, the book might crash, hang up, etc.  The cost of the Audio Player Widget is $149 and really is a good investment.  Click here for direct link to the Web Page for this tool.  Click here for Peter Jackson's Online Documentation for this Widget (actually a set of widgets).

Click here to view a really good demonstration of the Audio Player Widget supplied by Peter Jackson.

With the Audio Player Widget, if you have only one background or a limited number of backgrounds in your book, all you need to do is place one of the widgets on the background and then have an Audio Trigger button on the foreground. Once you have this set up, you can then trigger the Audio Trigger in any way you desire on the page. As an example, if you wanted to play audio feedback for correct and incorrect answers to a Question, you could have two Audio Triggers and trigger the appropriate one using the On question answered event.

When you purchase this tool, you get a Catalog Category of objects: Audio Player Widgets

Audio Player - allows you to use ONE WMP (Window Media Player) for your entire project (or one per background if you have multiple backgrounds). Then you assign audios as often and whenever they are needed. Can be triggered via the Audio Trigger and Audio List Widgets.

Audio Trigger - plays an audio file. When this "Audio Trigger Widget" is Triggered via an "Action Trigger Widget" the "Audio Player Widget" will play an audio file using the default Audio Path (global variable).

Audio List Trigger - plays a list of audio files. When this "Audio List Trigger Widget" is Triggered via an "Action Trigger Widget" the "Audio Player Widget" will play a list of audio files using the default Audio Path (global variable).

Page Audio Player - allows you to Trigger the "Audio Player Widget" on the background, use this Widget when the "Audio Player Widget" (on the background) is obscured by objects on the page. This allows you to use ONE WMP (Window Media Player) for your entire project (or one per background if you have multiple backgrounds). Then you assign audios as often and whenever they are needed. The "Audio Player Widget" on the background can also be triggered via the Audio Trigger and Audio List Widgets.

This is the Extended Properties dialog box for the Audio Player:

Here you can enter the audio file to play on the page. It would be most likely that you would do this if you wanted to automatically play your audio when each page is loaded.  One possible use of this would be to have the something like question text read when the page is loaded.  In that case, you also could make the Audio Control visible at Reader so that the learner could listen to the audio as much as they desired.  Then you could use the procedures below to play correct and incorrect audio files when the question is answered.  Note that the default is Audio Control is visible at reader. If you do not want the learner to see the Audio Control, uncheck this.  Note that in the Actions for this object, Autoplay is set to true.  If you do not enter a file to play nothing will happen.

Note that Comments are included to let you know the paths for the audio files for both Native and DHTML deployment. These are values for variables and can be changed if you desire. The default is to have an audio folder one level below your books in Native mode and to have an audio folder that is at a level beside your IE and NS folders in DHTML.

You also have the options for allowing this Player to be visible at Reader level as mentioned above as well as allowing the Reader to enter the Audio File name.

If you do not play the audio file on load page as illustrated above, you will need to add the Audio Trigger to the foreground of any page where you want to play an audio file.  Then you will set up the Extended Properties as shown here.

This adds this as the value for the variable FileName in the Actions Editor code for this object.

Now you would need something to trigger the Audio Trigger. As an example you could have set up a Question object in this manner:

Here you would have two Audio Triggers, one named Correct and one named Incorrect.  Note that you can have most any other event on your page set up to trigger one or several Audio Triggers.

The Audio List Trigger would be useful if you want to play several consecutive audio files. Here all you need to do is separate the list with commands.