THG TIM 2015, Техническое руководство

Страница: 34 / 48

TIM 2015 Technical Manual v1 (February 2018) Page 34
‘Precisely’ or ‘And xx seconds’) are quite short. Whereas the 0xx announcements (‘At the signal it will be xx hours’) are significantly longer. The precise
length of these differing segments varies according to the particular voice being played out but always totals slightly under 10 seconds. I understand this
entirely. Am I right in thinking that TIM 2015 does not expect these segments to conform to any predetermined length, so long as the sum total does not
exceed, say, 9.8 seconds?
Yes, it doesn't know how long the files are, it just puts all the files for a time announcement in a queue and plays the next file as soon as the Catalex indicates
the last file has finished playing. At the next time sequence at second x8 (or x0 for USA) it must start a new file queue regardless of whether the Catalex is
still busy or not in order to have the pips begin on time. So it needs to finish within about 9.8 seconds to ensure the module is not still busy when the next
pips file command is sent.
Does the Catalex player load up all of the segments needed to play a (nominally) 10-second announcement in one step? Or does it load each segment
separately as it needs it? I suspect it’s the latter but please confirm!
It is the latter, because the Catalex unit cannot play more than one file at a time. (I contacted Catalex about their ‘Serial Play’ command back in 2015 and
they said it did not work and removed it from their datasheet).
Does it matter that some segments are of variable length? It's evident that ‘Fifty-nine’ takes longer to say than ‘One’, and that ‘'And fifty seconds’ takes
longer than ‘Precisely’.
Not at all. The program just waits until the sound module sends a ‘File finished playing’ status string and then it plays the next file.
In case where the lengths of a particular segment do vary, do we need to pad them out with silence so that they all last the same (long) time?
There's no need to do that. The only thing that you may need to check is that the silence length between "and xx seconds" and the start of the pips is
acceptable and there are no combinations where the total length of the announcement overlaps the next pips (the software will always send the pips at the
start of x8 seconds and if the last file hasn't finished by then it would have unpredictable results (the sound may be corrupted or it may just not play the file)
The best thing to do is make sure the announcements finish at perhaps around x7 seconds and the software will automatically have about a second of
silence before it has to send the pips.
Can I add silence before or after words to make the end result sound more natural?