In General
The File Menu is the gateway in to and out of our electronic information storage areas. In effect, it is our long-term audio memory bank. The files themselves are the actual RECORDINGS of this information, in one's and zeroes on magnetic or optical media. If you want to really go fast, you can use a RAMdrive, and do most of the editing with saving to the RAMdrive, then make an occasional save to a real physical disk. In that case, it would be a short-term audio memory bank. It is the semi- permanent nature of magnetic (or optical) recordings that makes it a long-term memory.
Is there anything different about some of these familiar File Menu choices? What is it that we are actually saving? This is "digital" sound, so we are saving not only the vibrational quality of the sound, what it is saying, but also the loudness of it. This peculiarity allows us to edit the loudness, and create special effects, as well as cut and pasting the sound syllables. Other information about the data format is also included in some formats.
The filenames and pathnames are a mailing address, pointing to where we SAVEd these RECORDINGS. Without these filenames and pathnames, the disk drive programs could never find anything. We would have to keep on putting different floppies into the disk drive, for every file. Filenames and pathnames give the files a mailing ADDRESS or a cubbyhole name, so that the disk drive software can go get it out for us. Electronic mail, of course.
Simple enough, right? The familiar commands OpenFile, CloseFile, NewFile, SaveFile, and SaveFileAs options appear, and in addition to those, we find ImportFile, and ExportFile, which allows for some format conversion. We also find RevertFile, which is comforting when we have had a perfectly good recording, but then we had tried something new, some new editing mode, or special effect, and had inadvertently deleted the best part, saving the file before remembering to UnDo. It is nice to know that, even if we make mistakes, we can throw away our new changes, and use the last good copy. Otherwise, we might be afraid to try something new.
And, of course, we have the usual Exit choice, for when we are done, and we want to turn off the software.
| File Commands | |
| 1 | File, New < Alt > FN [< Ctrl > N] |
| 2 | File, Open < Alt > FO [< Ctrl > O] |
| 3 | File, Revert < Alt > FR |
| 4 | File, Save < Alt > FS [< Ctrl > S] |
| 5 | File, Save As < Alt > FA |
| 6 | File, Close < Alt > FC |
| 7 | File, Import < Alt > FI |
| 8 | File, Export < Alt > FE |
| 9 | File, Exit < Alt > FX |
| ESC | Backwards Out Of This Menu |
When we activate File,New, VFEdit calls out the File,New dialog box, to be sure and ask us
some things about how to set up the data header for the sound file. The main things that it wants to know
besides the filename, of course, are File Type, Data Format, Frequency.
VFEdit remembers our favorite settings in the VFEdit.INI file in the Windows directory. If you want to simplify some of the repetitive re-keying-in stuff, you can save a version of your VFEdit.INI file to a new name, such as VFEDtINI.wav, for waveaudio settings, and another version, VFEdtINI.vap, for Indexed Audio File settings, and another version, VFEdit.INI.vox, for pure audio format settings.
At first, just to get started, you could initialize these clone versions, by copying from VFEDIT.INI.
COPY VFEDIT.INI VFEDtINI.wav
COPY VFEDIT.INI VFEDtINI.vap
COPY VFEDIT.INI VFEDtINI.vox
You could, shortly after you work with VFEdit, in a particular type of file, for example, a .wav file,
rem manually
COPY VFEDIT.INI VFEDtINI.wav
and then, later, just before using VFEdit for that type of file again,
COPY VFEDtINI.wav VFEdit.INI
WIN /3 \VFEDIT\VFEDIT
COPY VFEDIT.INI VFEDtINI.wav
then, this can be made into a DOS batch file, for habitual use:
COPY CON VFWAVE.BAT
COPY VFEDtINI.wav VFEdit.INI
WIN /3 \VFEDIT\VFEDIT
COPY VFEDIT.INI VFEDtINI.wav
<Ctrl>Z
After you have this on your disk, you can type
VFWAVE
and you will be all set for wave type files.
You can also include other routine things, like loading in your sound card driver before calling up Windows.
COPY CON VFWAVE.BAT
COPY VFEDtINI.wav VFEdit.INI
wavetide
WIN /3 \VFEDIT\VFEDIT
COPY VFEDIT.INI VFEDtINI.wav
<Ctrl>Z
.......
This dialog box looks like the usual File,Open dialog box, except down at the bottom, a button named Format. If you try that one, you get a dialog box looking much like the File,New dialog box, with the same choices, except that the FileType isn't active, and all you can change are DataFormat, and Frequency. You must select an existing file, browse until you find one you like,
selecting it, or you must cancel. The file name and path name can be up to 40 characters in length. If you type in only the file name, then VFEdit assumes that you mean the current directory.
[ File,Open dialog box clp ]
After you pick one, press OK, or ENTER, and it will load in and display the sound file, in the Voice Print window.
[ voxprntw.clp ]
This is the face-saving one, the ultimate Undo mode, that keeps us from wasting a complete afternoon's work, just because we make one mistake. For example, we try to do something really fancy, with a new mode, or a new filter, or a new way of adjusting the volume, and the results are just crazy. Well, we can always just erase the blackboard, and put the last good version back up there, on the Voice Print window, by choosing File,Revert.
If you made any new RECORDINGS, or made any changes to your existing RECORDINGS, remember to complete those actions by saving your sound file to disk. The File,Save choice will not ask you for a name. It assumes that you want to finish by saving the same named file. If you try to Exit without first saving the current file, VFEdit will remind you by asking whether you wanted to save the changed file.
When you want to save a file for the first time, or to make a copy to a different name, use File,SaveAs. The dialog box looks pretty much the same as the File,Open one, except that it does not allow you to change the FileType or the DataFormat.
[ saveas.clp]
[ we should use a different font for the commands, and for the fields ]
Simple enough. This choice closes the Voice Print window, and the sound file associated with it, if one is being displayed. Can you Save or SaveAs, without first Closing? Yes, VFEdit knows how to do that, and in fact, if you Close it first, VFEdit will not be able to Save it. It will think that there is nothing to do.
The File,Import choice has a dialog box titled Import, much like the File,Open and the File,SaveAs dialog box, except that besides Format, and FileType, you also can tell VFEdit what kind of filter the pre-existing sound file was recorded with. So many choices. If you highlight the filter, you will see a dialog box titled Paste, with choice boxes for the AntiAliasing Filter, and the ResampleAlgorithm, just like on Record,Configure. When you are finished, and it starts to Import that other file, it takes a while, because it is taking a really close look at it. It includes a conversion utility, that can change files from one data format to another.
Sometimes you may want to output a sound file in a different format, than it was RECORDED in, so that it can go thru the conversion utility. We might as well call Import and Export data format converters. .............
And, here we find our stage exit left, our doorway out of VFEdit, like out of so many other menu-based programs, our orderly exit.
VFCHAP4.DOC 06-29-95 12:22am
An Industry Standard Data Format For Storing Digitized Sound
Signed,SixteenBit,Normalized,LInear,TwosComplement,Amplitude,Samples
Signed, all this means is that we are using the left-most bit, instead of ignoring it; in 16-bit data, this means that we are really using all 16 bits, not just the right 15 bits.
SixteenBit, this means that the data path is 2 bytes wide, and that the software manipulates the data in
2 byte chunks. A sixteen-bit sound card can process sound twice as fast as an eight-bit card.
Normalized, ......................
Linear, as opposed to what???
TwosComplement, I think that this means that if the number goes negative, we represent it as a mirror image, all the one's becoming zeroes, and all the zeros becoming one's, for example, a minus 1 is an "FF" in hexidecimal.
Amplitude,Samples in this respect, a digital sound card is a scientific laboratory data input device, reading a sound meter on the sound card
VFCHAP4.DOC 06-29-95 12:22am
VFCHAP4.DOC 07-09-95 1:12pm