THG TIM 2015, Technical Manual

Page: 33 / 48

TIM 2015 Technical Manual v1 (February 2018) Page 33
Here are some questions and answers:
British and Australian voices begin with three pips, starting at x8 seconds, so that the third pip occurs ‘on the button’ at the 00/10/20/30/40/50 seconds
timing. This is great and works well. However, this does not apply to all speaking clocks. In fact just about every other speaking clock makes do with a
single pip or toneburst and this needs to start on the dot of the 00/10/20/30/40/50 seconds timing. What is the best way of doing this?
The USA voices start with the single tone on the dot. If you create dummy blank 082, 083 and 084 files (morning, afternoon, evening), the Catalex player
should treat the sequence as USA type and sound a single tone at x0 seconds.
The next segment following the toneburst beep is usually some words along the lines of ‘At the tone the time will be...’ and to make this sound natural,
there needs to be a period of silence between the toneburst and the start of ‘At the tone...’ . But frequently it just does not work like that. I have tried
inserting silence before the announcement but either it is ignored or worse, it makes the total length of all the segments together too long, meaning
that the final ‘And ten seconds’ segment is truncated. If, alternatively, I add a period of silence after the toneburst in 080, then the beep is sounded too
early. What am I doing wrong?
When I was writing the program I found the Catalex module has some delays:
1: A serial command to the sound module takes 8ms
2: There is about 60ms silence at the start of a file while it fades-up the volume (maybe intended to make songs playback sound better?)
3: And about 30ms to access the microSD card file.
Because of all this the program starts the command for the pips file 98ms earlier than second 8 (or second 0 for US) to allow the pips to start playing
promptly at second 8 (or 0). The 60ms fade-up delay may be what is causing them to not sound right (If there is no brief period of silence at the start of a file
it may miss a bit of it while the Catalex fades-up.
The other delays (in the microSD card and the serial commands) may be contributing to the sequence over-running into the next pips and the Catalex then
gets confused and truncates announcements.
Also fragmentation of the microSD card files due to files being added/removed can cause the Catalex module to fail to play files (re-format the microSD card
and copy all files at once to avoid this).
In the general nature of things, the length of the various segments varies. For instance the toneburst/pips (080) and the final announcement (200-250