What can be customised
When a main or sub-show's opening screen is shown, you can use the "Options"
button, to set some useful show's options. The options present for all sub-shows
are: "Soundtrack On/Off" (will switch on and off the
sound usually played in the background), and "Opening Screen On/Off",
which will skip playing of the opening/intro screen and the music fragment and
start playing of the first clip right away. With the latter, beware that once
having it switched off, it becomes rather difficult to set it back, since playing
the opening screen is the only time when you can access the options button.
However, you still can turn the opening screen back on, if you press the "Rewind"
button and then try to click quickly a number of times when the show is rewinding
the sequence and hasn't yet started playing the first clip.
The first choice is usually to select the single clip's duration time (in seconds,
for the LivingPictures, and in minutes, for the MathFantasy animation
clips). A special duration called "original" is available
for the animation clips (enabled by default), - this lets the video clip play
exactly along the length of the clip's accompanying soundtrack (about 2 min.,
usually). With any other duration setting, the sound is stopped in the middle
of playing (if the selected duration is shorter than its playing time), or it's
being looped until the playing time reaches the duration selected. A bit differently
for the LivingPictures show, the default duration is 40 seconds,
- when it's selected, the whole LivingPictures sequence will be played
synchronised (as much as it's possible) with its single, 27 minutes long soundtrack,
and will end at approximately the same time with it.
Specifically for the LivingPictures show, you can also set it to run
in the "Paused" state (default is "Continuous"),
so that, when the first clip of the show will be displayed, no animated effects
will be performed, and no automatic advancing to the next clip will happen,
- you will have to click on ">>" ("Next
clip") or use the "Select" button, if you
want to see some other clip. Setting the show in such mode is essentially the
same as pressing on the "Pause" button when the sequence
is playing, so you can just press on the "Play" button,
to resume the normal, "Continuous", mode of the show.
Similarly, there is a mode called "LoopClip" that you
can set in the "Options" for the MathFantasy Clips,
which will set the show to play the first animation clip in an endlessly looping
fashion, without any advancing to the next one; you will need to use the ">>"
or "Select" buttons, to navigate to another clip. However,
unlike the "Paused"/"Continuous"
options, you can't use the "Play" button to resume the
normal mode of playback, - you should go back to the opening screen (with the
"Rewind" button) and set the "Continuous"
mode again.
You can save the currently selected options by using the last, "Save
Options", choice, but this will only work when the show is run from
the hard disk, because this is done by means of an .ini file written into the
same folder on the disk where the sub-show files are. For instance, for the
MathFantasy clips this will be the MFShow.ini file, for LivingPictures,
this is LPClips.ini, and so on. This gives you a way to adjust the default
settings for the show once and forever, without doing it with the menu selections,
every time you start it (for example, if you dislike the soundtrack provided
with the show, and want to play the music of your own choice). To do so, you
will need just to open the .ini file in question in the Notepad
program or in any other text editor, look for the corresponding option line
(they are all very simple to understand) and change it.
For instance, if you don't want the music soundtrack to play during the show,
change the .ini file's line
Soundtrack On
to
Soundtrack Off
And, if you don't like the opening screen anymore, change
OpeningScreen On
to
OpeningScreen Off
You still can enable back any of these with the menu option or by changing
the .ini file to its default state. If you are not sure what were the
default settings, you can restore them easily by manual deleting of the .ini
file, starting up of the show and using the "Save Options"
menu choice.
The same holds for the other options ("ClipDuration"
and "PlayBack" mode), specific for the sub-shows, - you
can change them permanently, by selecting of relevant menu choices and using
the "Save Options" command, or by manual editing of the
.ini file.
Another configurable option is the clip playlists used by the sub-shows. For
the LivingPictures sequence, the playlist is kept in the file LPShowPlaylist,
and for the MathFantasy Clips, it's in MFPlaylist. Since these
are simple text files, you can easily change the order of the clips, remove
some of them (those you find you can live without, perhaps), or even extend
the list, - that is, with the clips that you will download from the SynthArt
site, using the CD-ROM's 
"Download
SynthArt clips" option (see the "Extending
it online" chapter). In the LivingPictures playlist file,
you will find the clip group names too, i.e. words enclosed in the square brackets
"[]", - these are used for the grouping of the clips into more manageable
menu choices. They reflect the history of the SynthArt works, see the web site's
"Rooms"
pages, for a better idea on that.
Changing the playlist files' contents is very easy, indeed, - just don't forget
that the soundtrack for LivingPictures was synchronised with the original
order of the clips, so you will have to sync the sound yourself again with the
clips in the new order, if you want to keep the original music background. Or...
there is another option to customise (see below).
Note also that, if you remove the playlist file completely from the folder,
the show will still play a full set of the clips, - in such case, the SynthArt
software will scan all the clip files in the folder (those with the .dxr
extension) and play them in an alphabetical or arbitrary order.
One more thing you can try to customise the show to your taste, is the musical
soundtrack used for the longest clips sequence from the CD-ROM, the LivingPictures
Show. Not only you can disable its background music, if you don't like it,
but you can also substitute the music of you own choice! To do so, however,
you should have first installed the show's contents on your hard disk. Then,
you would locate the Soundtrack.avi file in the LPShow folder
(.avi, as many of you know, is a Windows video animation format; however,
this particular file was made specially for this show and contains practically
only the MPEG3-compressed sound material) and replace it with another
one having the same file name, but containing the soundtrack that you want to
play during the LP slide-show. Your only concern will be that the show's duration
was designed to play for about 27 minutes, and the video clips were more-or-less
synchronised to the music's mood, but nothing prevents you to set it to any
other length. Or, even simpler, instead of dealing with a custom .avi
file, you could just insert in the drive and play any musical CD of your choice
during the show...
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