Help Page:  How to Solve Problems With Sound Playback

 

How to Make Our Sounds Pages Load Faster
How Best to View These Pages
How to Listen to Our Sound Recordings
If You Can’t Hear Any Sounds at All…
How to Get ‘Hover Sounds’ to Work

 

 

How to Make Our Sounds Pages Load Faster

There are three ways to view these pages:  on our website, on one of our cd‑roms, or by saving the whole site to your hard drive.  All have identical content, but the sound files and pages load more slowly on the web than from the cd‑rom, and much faster still from your hard drive.  So if you plan to use these pages a lot, we recommend this third option.  Here’s how to do this…

   If you have a copy of our cd‑rom, create a new folder anywhere on your hard drive and name it as you wish (say ‘soundcomparisons’).  Then find the cd‑rom in ‘My Computer’ (usually drive D), select the entire contents of the cd‑rom, and just drag them into your new ‘soundcomparisons’ folder.

   If you don’t have a copy of our cd‑rom, then instead you can download our whole site as a single zipped file.  This is very big, at 96 MB, so you’ll need a broadband internet connection, and even then it will take a few minutes.  Your computer may ask you where you want to save the file.  Save it to wherever you wish on your hard drive, and once it has finished downloading there, unzip the soundcomparisons.zip file (in Windows, right-click on the file and do ‘Extract All…”).  This will create a folder called ‘soundcomparisons’ on your hard drive, alongside the .zip file (which you can then delete if you wish).  To start the download process now, click here.

To run the programme from your hard drive, just go into the new ‘soundcomparisons’ folder and double-click on the start.htm file there.

 

 

How Best to View These Pages

We recommend Firefox as the best web browser for viewing these pages, for various reasons:

   Firefox has no problems in displaying the phonetic symbols we use in our transcriptions.  Internet Explorer (as of version 7) is unable to display many of them correctly, and just shows empty boxes instead.  There seems to be no solution to this, though perhaps later updates will fix it. 

   Firefox has a faster response than Internet Explorer in playing the sound recordings when you move the mouse over the corresponding transcription link.

   While any table of sound recordings is being loaded – which can take up to twenty seconds or so even on a high-speed connection – Internet Explorer shows a blank page;   Firefox shows the table being built up as it is loaded.

 

Otherwise, we have tried to ensure a good presentation in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  This website may work in other browsers, but this cannot be guaranteed.

We recommend a screen resolution of at least 800 pixels horizontally, preferably more.  

 

 

How to Listen to Our Sound Recordings

Wherever on these pages you see a phonetic transcription , it is there to show that there is a sound recording for you to hear.  (Transcriptions that are [greyed out] are those for which we do not have the corresponding recording, mostly historical varieties.)

You can choose between two different ways to play the sounds, depending how you want to listen to them, and on how your computer is set up.

   Hover to hear.  All you need do is move your mouse to move the cursor on top of the (‘hovering’ over the link), and the sound plays automatically.  You don’t even have to click on the link, so this is the easiest or the fastest way to listen to our recordings. 

However, this ‘hover to hear’ system only works if your computer is using a fairly recent version of Windows and a web browser, and there are certain settings which may disable it.

   Click to hear.  If hovering doesn’t work on your computer, then you will have to actually click on a in order to hear it.  This should play the sound in a tiny sound player frame in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, though if your computer is set to play .mp3 files by default in a different player such as Windows Media Player, it may open a new window and play the sound recording there instead.  (If so, you’ll probably want to switch this off, so see the help section below on How to Get ‘Hover Sounds’ to Work).

This ‘click to hear’ system should work on almost all computers, unless yours has particularly strict settings or a more general problem with sound reproduction. 

 

To test now which system(s) your computer can use, try just moving your mouse cursor over .  If you can’t hear a confirmation recording, then try actually clicking on the .  If you still can’t hear anything, you may have a problem with the sound system on your computer, so see the next section below.

 

 

If You Can’t Hear Any Sounds at All…

If you can’t hear any sounds at all, first please be patient!  Wait for each page to appear fully on your screen – some pages need to load many sound files into memory too, and even on a fast computer, it may take twenty seconds or so for a page to load! 

Once a page has loaded in full on your screen, the sounds should work.  So try moving your mouse cursor over , and if that doesn’t work then try clicking on .  If you still can’t hear anything, you may have a problem with the sound system on your computer.  Some of the possible solutions are easy ones, so you could try these:

   Check that the sound on your computer has not been set to mute or silent mode:  Start > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices.

   Check that the sound volume on your computer is turned up high enough to hear it.

   If your computer sound output is connected to external loudspeakers, check that they are switched on.

   Check whether your computer sound output is connected to external earphones, and if so put them on and check that they are switched on too, if necessary.

   Your internet browser (i.e. Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) may also need to be configured to work properly with a sound player. 

   In Firefox, look under:  Tools > Options > Content > File Types > Manage, select the MP3 extension and do Change Action.  We recommend that you select the bottom option and set Firefox to use the QuickTime Plug-in (which can be downloaded free if you don’t yet have it). 

   In Internet Explorer, look under:  Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > Play Sounds, and make sure the box is ticked.  You may also need to ensure that Add-Ons work:  we recommend the QuickTime Plug-in (which can be downloaded free if you don’t yet have it).  Set this by doing:  Tools > Internet Options > Programs > Manage Add-Ons. 

   Check that your computer has a sound card and that is working properly:  Start > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices.

 

 

How to Get ‘Hover Sounds’ to Work

If you would prefer to use ‘hover to hear’ but can only get ‘click to hear’ to work on your computer, and/or if clicking always opens a new window to play the sound, there may be a simple way to fix this.  You have to make sure that the sound player on your computer (most often, Windows Media Player) is not set as the default sound player for .mp3 files.  To do this for Windows Media Player, open it and do:  Tools – Options – File Types, then untick the box opposite the entry “mp3 audio files (mp3)”.  (If your Windows Media Player does not offer you this option, it’s probably because your user account on that computer does not have rights to change this setting, so you’ll have to get someone with an Administrator user account to change it.)

 

If this is not the problem, then another reason could be that your computer does not recognise JavaScript, or does not allow it to run.  JavaScript is normally built into most modern internet browsers and computers that use the operating system Windows Vista, XP, 2000 or Millennium.  Even if you use one of these with an up-to-date browser, JavaScript still needs to be enabled in your web browser too:

   In Firefox, look under:  Tools > Options > Content > File Types > Manage, and make sure the Enable JavaScript box is ticked. 

   In Internet Explorer, look under:  Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Java, and make sure the box is ticked.  You may also have to change Java add-on settings under Tools > Internet Options > Programs > Manage Add-Ons. 

Older computers, particularly those with earlier operating systems such as Windows 95 or 98, do not automatically recognise JavaScript.

   The simplest solution is to make sure you have a recent version of an internet browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 or later.  This is free and easily available for download on the internet, or included with many cd‑roms.  To check which version you are using now, do Help > About Internet Explorer.

   If you have an old operating system like Windows 95 or 98, you may have to upgrade to a more recent one such as XP, 2000 or Millennium, but beware that if you have an old computer you may not have enough memory to use it.