announcement problems

[field888]

I am having some difficulty with sending announcements using the speak to file option (no physical input to sonos). I am trying to use the HS speak action. Any text that I put in the speak action box works great, but if I try to play a wave file by itself or with text using the'|' delimiter, the wav file will not play, but the file\path is actually spoken. I'm assuming the full path/file name is required. Is this even possible w/o using scripts?

HS2
Windows8
Speaker proxy is checked
speak to file is checked
linkgroup is defined, TTS is not checked, no speaker device is entered (scripting only?)
what is 'force wait flag' used for?

thanks in advance for any help!!

[dcorsus]

I am having some difficulty with sending announcements using the speak to file option (no physical input to sonos). I am trying to use the HS speak action. Any text that I put in the speak action box works great, but if I try to play a wave file by itself or with text using the'|' delimiter, the wav file will not play, but the file\path is actually spoken. I'm assuming the full path/file name is required. Is this even possible w/o using scripts?

HS2
Windows8
Speaker proxy is checked
speak to file is checked
linkgroup is defined, TTS is not checked, no speaker device is entered (scripting only?)
what is 'force wait flag' used for?

thanks in advance for any help!!

If it speaks the filename, it means there is something wrong (missing) in the filename+path or the file is not accessible.
Perhaps you can post the script/event/action screen shot

Dirk

[field888]

Dirk,
I moved the wav file to the C root directory to simplify things, added an event to test if the wave file played as it normally does through the HS speaker client (which it did), followed by an event to play the same file through SONOS. Which it didn't - nothing at all. I tried putting some text in prior to the wav file and that did play through Sonos, but again, no wav file sound.
what am I doing wrong?
Doug

[dcorsus]

Dirk,
I moved the wav file to the C root directory to simplify things, added an event to test if the wave file played as it normally does through the HS speaker client (which it did), followed by an event to play the same file through SONOS. Which it didn't - nothing at all. I tried putting some text in prior to the wav file and that did play through Sonos, but again, no wav file sound.
what am I doing wrong?
Doug

c:yelp.wav is not the same as c:\yelp.wav

The prior takes current default path and places it on the C drive whereas the latter is a full and proper path name.

Dirk

[field888]

Dirk,
Sorry, I had already tried it with the backslash -no good, then took it out for giggles - trying anything at this point.
Doug

[dcorsus]

Dirk,
Sorry, I had already tried it with the backslash -no good, then took it out for giggles - trying anything at this point.
Doug

Have you tried removing the first action (play .wav)? If that locks the file, that would explain why the file name is spoken. The way my PI works, it takes the file name verbatim, do a "file exist" vb.net function. if it returns false, it assumes it is text and you will hear it spoken. If the "file exist" function returns true, the speaker client will be called with the file name. So you either still have a syntax error or the file is not accessible (permission issues, already opened ...)

Dirk

[dcorsus]

Have you tried removing the first action (play .wav)? If that locks the file, that would explain why the file name is spoken. The way my PI works, it takes the file name verbatim, do a "file exist" vb.net function. if it returns false, it assumes it is text and you will hear it spoken. If the "file exist" function returns true, the speaker client will be called with the file name. So you either still have a syntax error or the file is not accessible (permission issues, already opened ...)

Dirk

One more note, if you don't hear anything, it means there is another issue!! Either the speaker client isn't working or the Sonos player can't transfer the file from the HS PC to the Sonos Player (firewall/antivirus issue). In this case, if you look at the Sonos Controller, do you see it attempting to play a file and if so what error is showing?

Dirk

[field888]

I put the first action in there for this demo to show that the file plays through HS normally, but i see what you mean about a possible lock issue, so I removed it. Also turned UAC off.
I'm not familiar with VB, so that's not an option for now. The file does get annunciated and shows on the controller as an announcement with your name.

[dcorsus]

I put the first action in there for this demo to show that the file plays through HS normally, but i see what you mean about a possible lock issue, so I removed it. Also turned UAC off.
I'm not familiar with VB, so that's not an option for now. The file does get annunciated and shows on the controller as an announcement with your name.

How about you post 2 screenshots:

One of the event and a second screenshot of Windows Explorer (showing the file and full path name on top)

Dirk

[field888]

decided to try using one of the standard windows system wav files and it worked, so the issue must be with my wav file. While investigating, I opened the Sonos\announcement folder and found a bunch of wav files eg: ANN_TSS-(number). Interestingly enough, when I played them, some were actually the wav file I was trying to get working, so it shows up here and plays using media player, but doesn't actually play as announcement, but gets logged as announcement.

[dcorsus]

decided to try using one of the standard windows system wav files and it worked, so the issue must be with my wav file. While investigating, I opened the Sonos\announcement folder and found a bunch of wav files eg: ANN_TSS-(number). Interestingly enough, when I played them, some were actually the wav file I was trying to get working, so it shows up here and plays using media player, but doesn't actually play as announcement, but gets logged as announcement.

The file gets copied to my subdirectory because it needs to be accessible using the HS2 built in (HTTP) web server, which points to subdirectories based on <HSroot>\html
The file gets renamed while being copied. If you hear the name of the file being announced it means that the (source) file was not accessible. if the copy fails or the copied file fails to be transferred to the Sonos player .. or the file structure is wrong, in all latter cases, you hear nothing.

Dirk

[field888]

Dirk,
I had recently upgraded to a new laptop running windows8.1, used solely for HS. I noticed that many times I was getting UAC warning messages even though I have admin privileges, so I completely turned off UAC via reg settings (lowering the slider does not do it). I am now able to use any files in the HS speak box via the 'speak to file' setting. Thanks for all the guidance and help! Plug-in is doing everything I want, so far.
PS What is the functionality of the "force wait flag' ??
Doug

[dcorsus]

PS What is the functionality of the "force wait flag' ??
Doug

It is a relic of a time long ago when one needed to use scripting to do linking/announcement/unlinking in the script and if memory serves me well, described in the help documentation.
Not relevant for 99.999% of the cases today.

Dirk