Sound 5 [Toolbars]

Sound5:

Inserts the Outlook Express 5 sound embedding "script"
Prompts for music
Goes either immediately after <body> tag or immediately before </head> tag

How to use it: This isn't actually a script but is instead simply an HTML tag. It is basically the way that sound is embedded into a webpage. For all that, however in arach it works much the same as the OE4 sound embedding script. When you click the button you will be prompted for the sound to be embedded.

You can also easily set the number of times that your sound will repeat. In the script itself you will notice this line:

Notice the loop="1" portion at the end of that line? That tells your sound to play once. By altering this line you may change the number of times that the sound plays, for example, loop="3" would cause the sound to play thrice.

To achieve an infinite loop, set this to loop="-1".

Of course it couldn't quite be that easy. At the time of this writing, IE5 (and OE5) are still in beta - thus there are a few "issues" where this option is concerned. I'm hoping these will be resolved by the time the final version arrives. What these issues mean to you, the OE5 user is that before you can use the Sound5 button there is one thing you may need to set up. Because of a limitation in the way the new Outlook Express works, we might have to trick Arach into creating a full path to the sound used. OE can't seem to find the file if certain relative links are used.

As you might imagine - the instructions that follow are subject to your organizational structure, please keep that firmly in mid as you read this section.

What happens is OE5 (at the moment) can't locate your sound file unless a full path name is used. Since Arach doesn't create the full path name automatically, we need to make one small change to this button (I can't do it for you since I don't know where you keep your sounds...)

The first thing you need to do is locate all your sound files on your hard drive. Hopefully you keep them all in a central location. Once you know that location, return to Arach. Now, go to Tools | Toolbars\Macros | Edit Toolbars.

In the Edit Toolbars dialog box, on the first tab, select Stationery Scripts in the drop down list. Now switch to the Edit Toolbar command tab. This time, select Sound5 in the drop down list. You will see the following in the Command window:

<BGSOUND balance=0 src="file:///E:/Stationery/[macro:x]" volume=0>

This code of course represents the location of the sound files on my system (I had to get it working here first of course). What you need to do is change this to represent the actual location of the sound files on your system.

Before you tell it where your sound files are however, there is one thing you need to know. The actual location of the music files on my system is E:/Stationery/Music, but as you can see above, I have only told it E:/Stationery. This is because Arach automatically inserts the name of the folder where the files reside. All you must do is tell it about the higher level folders. This is true even if you use the Auto-copy feature to move your sound files to your stationery folder.

That is, if your music files are kept in C:/Windows/Media, you would change the above code to read: src="file:///C:/Windows/[macro:x]".

Be sure to preserve the file:/// and the [macro:x] - both are critical (also, pay close attention to the direction of your slash marks, you want / not \). Enter your change into the Command window of the toolbar editor then hit close. Be sure to test it. Use the Sound 5 button, and pick a music file make sure that the path as shown in the code is correct if not, make any changes as necessary.

I'm very sorry about this, I know it's a pain, but for the moment this is how it has to be. I've written to both the Author of Arachnophilia and Microsoft to explain this limitation in each program - we'll just have to wait and see if anyone pays me any attention...

Now that you have it setup - where in your code do you put this. When you're designing stationery, put the <bgsound> tag (as inserted by the Sound 5 button) either immediately following the <body> tag or just before the </head> tag:

<html>
<head>
<style>
body {

}
</style>

<---- Insert here

</head>

<body BACKGROUND="graphics/background.jpg" bgCOLOR="#000000"> <---- or Insert here

</body>
</html>

Inserting it just before the </head> tag would be the better of the two because in the "body" location the sound tends not to play in replies to your message.

Finally, Outlook Express 5 beta 2 has some well known problems with sound. Namely it doesn't seem to work. You can get it to work however, simply by using this option twice in succession:

Be sure to pick the some sound file both times.