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 for The Garden Of Mirrors clips). The default duration is 40 seconds, - when it's selected, the whole sequence will be played synchronised (as much as it's possible) with its single, approx. 20 minutes-long soundtrack, and will end at approximately the same time with it.

Specifically for the LivingPictures and The Garden Of Mirrors shows, 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.

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 LivingPictures this will be LPClips.ini, for The Garden Of Mirrors, MirrorClips.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 and The Garden Of Mirrors sequences, the playlist is kept in the files LPShowPlaylist and MirrorsPlaylist, respectively. 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. Specifically for The Garden Of Mirrors, you will find the transition effects in the playlist set individually for each 'mirror', - feel free to change them to something what you think suits better the particular image (hopefully, it won't be too difficult to figure those transitions in the contents of the file), on your course of this show customisation.

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 soundtracks used for the two longest clips sequence from the CD-ROM, the LivingPictures Show and The Garden Of Mirrors. 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 and GardenOfMirrors folders (.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 slide-shows. Your only concern will be that the show's duration was designed to play for about 20 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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