[RESOLVED] Why is my clock not ticking ?

[Poppa Mintin]

This subroutine has been giving me trouble for two days now.

Imports CoreAudio

    Private Sub TimerTick() Handles Timer1.Tick
        My.Computer.Audio.Play(My.Resources.Tikk, AudioPlayMode.Background)     
    End Sub

Timer1 is running, Timer1 Interval is set to 100 and Tikk.wav is only 60 milliseconds long but it only plays once in a blue moon.
CoreAudio.DLL has been added to References, and is in the bin folder, the computer volume is at 100%
I've stripped this subroutine down to the bare minimum as shown, but I still don't get a tick sound every second.

I can see no reason why not.


Poppa

[wes4dbt]

Don't know much about this type of process but do you realize that 100ms is only 1 tenth of a second. Can you really load a resource and play a wav file in 1 tenth of a second. Also maybe increase the duration of the tikk. I could be way off but that's the first thing that struck me.

[Poppa Mintin]

Oh Bugger !

I had it set to 100 earlier when I was running at a tenth, then I realised that I didn't need to be that precise, changed it to seconds, changed the interval to 1000, then when something went wrong, I did 'undo' a few times to get back to where I'd gone wrong, forgot to change that back to 1000 because I was so used to it being 100.

Easy to overlook the obvious. It's ticking away merrily again now.

Thanks Wes.


Poppa

[jmcilhinney]

I think that I have mentioned this before but every time you access a property of My.Resources you create a new object, which means that the data has to be extracted from the EXE again. Don't do that. Extract your resource once only, assign it to a field and then use that field each time. If you know for a fact that you will use the data then just initialise the field where you declare it, e.g.

Private ReadOnly tikk As Byte() = My.Resources.Tikk

If you may not use it at all then use a property that will extract the resource on the first use, e.g.

Private _tikk As Byte()
 
Private ReadOnly Tikk As Byte()
    Get
        If _tikk Is Nothing Then
            _tikk = My.Resources.Tikk
        End If
 
        Return _tikk
    End Get
End Property

[Poppa Mintin]

Thanks John,

I'll bear that in mind, I don't remember you telling me that before, but then, my memory's not what it used to be.
I had to give up the bridge club a few years ago my memory was embarrassing me, and worse I'm sure it was upsetting my bridge partner.

I've already implemented your suggestion in this and four previous projects. I'll wade through a load more once I've put this particular one to bed.


Poppa

[jmcilhinney]

I'll bear that in mind, I don't remember you telling me that before, but then, my memory's not what it used to be.

I've mentioned it once or twice recently but don't recall to whom. My memory is what it used to be, which is no great recommendation.

I had to give up the bridge club a few years ago my memory was embarrassing me, and worse I'm sure it was upsetting my bridge partner.

Plot twist: it was canasta but you forgot.

[Poppa Mintin]

I only did four previous projects because on the fifth I got an error:

Error BC30311 Value of type 'UnmanagedMemoryStream' cannot be converted to 'Byte()'.

When I couldn't find what that meant, I went back to the project in progress.

Maybe it's missing an Import ?


Poppa

[jmcilhinney]

The type of a My.Resources property depends on the type of the file added in the first place. I'm not sure but it may depend on other factors too, e.g. the size file. It may be that a Byte array is returned up to a particular size and an UnmanagedMemoryStream is returned for larger data or it may just depend on file type. Regardless, and UnmanagedMemoryStream can be treated pretty much like any other Stream. That Play method you're calling does have an overload that will accept a Stream so, in theory, you could do exactly the same thing but declare the field/property as type Stream or UnmanagedMemoryStream instead of Byte().

That said, I don't think that that's a good idea. That would mean keeping the Stream open all the time and you'd just end up reading the data over and over anyway. If you were going to do that, you may as well just pass the My.Resources property as you were in the first place. Instead, assuming that the amount of data is not to large, you should get the Stream once, read the data from it into a Byte array and then close the Stream. Now you have a Byte array that you can use in the same way as you already are.