email audio embedding & sound effects formats

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Hello helpful Audacity staff,

After successfully using some basic features in Audacity, I also was finally successful in installing and using TiMidity for converting MIDI files to WAV with invaluable help from steve… now I’m trying to find out if I’m going up a dead-end ally with my next audio related project.

I wanted to ask if anyone knows of a way to embed a sound file in to an email in such a way that it starts playing automatically when the email is opened.

I got all kinds of input and tried quite a few things that were supposed to make that work, but apparently email client software makers have almost completely stripped that feature of embedding an audio file into an email to make it play automatically because spammers were abusing it. Now apparently that feature is only available, that I can find out about, in MS Outlook.

I tried Thunderbird, which I use for email, and its “Options>Format>HTML” then “Insert>HTML” trick to try to make an audio file play automatically or to present a play button within the email, and I even tried inserting several different chunks of code, but none of it worked on the receiving end when the email came through in Windows Live Mail 2011 or Thunderbird recipient email client programs… once with the code it looked like it was trying to put some kind of a player interface in an email because there was a box that showed up on the received email, but that was it, just an empty box.

I know all the receiver has to do is to double-click on the attached audio file and it will play in their default audio player, but sometimes even that is too hard for my mom or some other less than computer savvy family members of mine because they can’t find the attachment icon on the email.

Yesterday I installed and tried the “Send-A-Message” application, but it turns out that it just attaches the audio file recordings that it can make to an email and those have to be double-clicked to play on the receiving end anyway… Inventivio support staff answered an email that I sent to them and confirmed that Send-A-Message just attaches their sound files to an email the same way as anyone can and there are no other options.

And, speaking of the Inventivio Send-A-Message app, they have sound effect files that can be downloaded in “PTH”, “PTD” “BKH” and “BKD” format… does anyone know what those formats are and if they can be converted to something usable outside of Send-A-Message?.. I’m gergling this topic now, but there are allot of results to sort through with many trap-door buttons on these webpages that could lead to mean viruses.

Thanks very much,

digiday

2

In my opinion any decent email client should not play anything automatically… (I don’t even like when it opens pics automatically, that’s why I have the option to show attachments unchecked on thunderbird)

This is the kind of thing that usually I can only expect to happen on software coming from Microsoft or alike.

In the case of Thunderbird try searching the plugins to see if you can find anything relevant. That’s the only way I can think of for doing such thing on thunderbird.

3

As far as I’m aware Mozilla have drawn a line under this and decided that e-mails should not automatically run anything without the users explicit consent. It seems to be their opinion that if someone really wants to use a totally insecure e-mail client they can use one from Microsoft.

4

Good decision I say! Kudos to Mozilla!

5

Somewhere in there, I lost track of who wrote and who was the quote: I get it, email programs won’t do that anymore.

steve wrote:

bgravato wrote:

steve wrote:

bgravato wrote:

steve wrote:

bgravato wrote:In the case of Thunderbird try searching the plugins to see if you can find anything relevant. That’s the only way I can think of for doing such thing on thunderbird.

As far as I’m aware Mozilla have drawn a line under this and decided that e-mails should not automatically run anything without the users explicit consent. It seems to be their opinion that if someone really wants to use a totally insecure e-mail client they can use one from Microsoft.

The reason that I wanted to do that was illustrated today when I sent my sister a regular little MP3 attached to an email, she double-clicked it and it wouldn’t play on her PC with Windows 7 at work, but it played handily on this PC with Windows 7 when I did a test send to myself and I tried double-clicking on it both in WLM 2011 and in Thunderbird… her work PC otherwise plays MP3s all day long… go figure.

digiday

6

Hi again steve and bgravato,

I forgot to ask, did you guys know anything about the “PTH”, “PTD” “BKH” and “BKD” file formats?.. I gergled them and I found info about the PTH format that explained, in secret code, what it is and said that WMP would open and play them, but it will not, and I when I go to the webpage that the WMP message takes me to, it doesn’t show a codec for PTH or any of the others.

There’s a webpage that mentions that Winmp 5.6 may handle PTH files, so I’m looking in to that now before I try installing the Winamp.

It’s a little funny if one really considers what emails can display even without Javascript support since they can still display animated gif files… if spammers really want to put moving images on an email, all it takes is an animated gif, and I read how if a spammer really wants to drive traffic to a website, they can put an animated image along with a link that says it will go to an audio playback for more information, and based on statistics of traffic driven to websites via email ads, people are far more likely to click on a link with an animation next to it that promises to play an audio description of some goods or services because the average consumer-citizen likes listening to and watching stuff/ads, instead of reading them.

I used to make custom email flyers for a luxury real-estate agency but those were sent to people who were already interested, perspective clients, and I never used sound or even animated gifs, although with access to MS Outlook then, maybe I should have.

i.e… See my little gif attachment that would be very hypnotizing and allow me to take control of email viewer’s minds… this tiny version looks a little messed up… the big one is very sharp, and very persuasive…

So between animated gifs and links that promise to go to an audio description of something, an email can still be very, very persuasive over the average mindless Joe/Josephine surfing the web or looking at his/her email… that’s provided that they look at an email from a spammer or one actually gets past 12 layers of junk email filters, which is rare… yet everyday people still click on links and open attachments on emails that then take over their computers to make them part of a worldwide conspiracy to take over the world and put Dr. Evil (aka Dick Cheney & Carl Rove) back in control.

I think bgravato is right… the world should be purged of the axis of evil that is audio embedded in to an email.

But I digress… do you guys know anything about the “PTH”, “PTD” “BKH” and “BKD” formats?

Thanks

digiday

7

I’d say anything embedded is evil! Your trick wouldn’t work with me because I have thunderbird set not to open any attachments (not even images). I’m not that paranoid, I don’t do it for security reasons. I do it just to avoid taking all my bandwidth downloading 6MB blurry images that many friends like to share and don’t know how to reduce the size of the pics they take with their 15mp cameras.
I still send my emails in plain text for the simplicity and full compatibility of it! What can I say… I’m from old school… I used to read my email on a text-only terminal using text-only mail clients such as mutt (I still do that occasional nowadays when needed).

Never heard of any of those formats, sorry. But they sound evil :smiling_imp:

8

Hi bgravato,

I was just joshing with you… no need to explain your motives… if I could implant an audio file in emails to send to my family I would, especially since some of them play little custom MP3s that I sent to them just fine and others can’t seem to play them no matter how much savvy they are or not… on the same type of Windows machines… I figure the few with Macs aren’t having any problems.

As for the weird sound file formats, this one website listed a few very obscure apps to open them, but I found that I don’t need to… those files came from the Speak-A-Message (SAM) website from a few weeks ago when I was downloading them thinking that they would work in SAM once I installed it… but on their own, they are useless.

Once SAM is installed, and a microphone is plugged in to the computer, then one can download and install all of these little sound effect files, then after a little fooling with it, save the files to WMA and MP3 format to one’s own hard drive to then use for stuff in Audacity.

I have another question though about why my microphone is only producing a constant low noise buzz on this computer without any ability to produce a sound from my voice or anything… this Windows 7 ULT recognizes the microphone and it shows up under CONTROL PANEL>SOUND>RECORDING>MICROPHONE>PROPERTIES>GENERAL,LISTEN & LEVELS… but when I check “listen to this device”, I just get a low noise buzz that also comes through in Audacity and that’s all it will record.

I had a problem before my other question with trying to record streaming desktop audio content and my computer refused to allow that to happen, no matter what, so I don’t know if this is related or not… steve was trying with all of his mite to help me with that, but it never worked.

Steve was invaluable when helping me with getting TiMidity installed and working… that took some real knowledge and testing on his part.

I guess I’ll post this new question in its proper category in a little bit.

I wish I could record something with this computer in Audacity… at least I figured out how to nab the little Speak-A-Message sound effects for later use outside of SAM.

PS: Glad to see this site and the Audacity wiki and all back online.

Thanks,

digi

9

Those who can’t play the mp3s have you tried to send them the files in wma format?

I remember many years ago when i still used windows that i got some problem with getting mp3’s on msn. Windows (or msn app not sure) was deleting them after it finished getting file because it considered it to be a dangerous format. So it would delete everything with an .mp3 extension (it’s actually stupid to allow for the full transfer to be completed and then delete it… would make more sense to reject the transfer in the first place but… oh well… it’s microsoft we’re talking about :stuck_out_tongue:). Anyway try sending them the file in wma format and see if that works.

Regarding your mic issue with windows 7 I’d suggest starting a new thread in the windows forum about it.

10

Hi bgravato,

My sister, for example, is one who is getting the attached MP3 on her email, but says it won’t play… but she otherwise plays MP3s all day… I don’t know if she’s tried dragging it to a folder and then putting it in her audio player or not… sometimes she’s a little cryptic about what’s going on… but she shouldn’t have to do anything but double-click on it… that’s why I was trying the audio embedding in an email thing.

As for her email carrier, she’s on a Cal State University server at work, and it doesn’t filter anything out… she’s getting the attachments… whatever is going on is just taking all the fun out of the pay-off of having her listen to something that I’ve put time in to.

I guess I could make her a special WMA and send that… it’s a bit more of a step since I send some of this stuff out in a family and friends email list and send MP3s because they are more universal for those who use Macs too… for example, she uses a Mac at home, as I do along with this PC, but she opens her email at work far more frequently because she doesn’t get on her home computer for email that much since she’s tired of it by the time she gets home.

And I did put my mic problem question up at this link… https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/only-a-low-buzz-noise-coming-through-my-microphone/17648/3

Thanks,

digiday

11

I completely agree on the mp3 vs wma… I hate wma and I’d never use it unless I didn’t have any other option…
I don’t like mp3’s that much either hehe But unfortunately really free and open formats such as ogg vorbis and flac keep being ignore by the makers of the standard media playing software on the OSes you mentioned… I wonder if the fact that the makers of those media playing software are the some makers of proprietary formats have anything to do with it… :unamused:

Sorry I won’t comment on that other post of yours… I don’t use windows, don’t know that much about it and (believe it or not) I’ve never seen windows 7 in my life :slight_smile:

12

I had only used Windows before October in an as necessary capacity in some work places… but in my industry and at home, Mac has always been the standard… then I helped a family member fix their PC that had a Vista/RAM meltdown and I installed Windows 7 for them and discovered that it is by far the most stable and reliable (Windows) OS ever… so I decided to add a Windows 7 machine to my arsenal of Macs so I’d have the best of two worlds, Mac and PC… this is a very nice OS that hasn’t crashed even one time in over 3 months now… so it has a place along with my Macs.

I have WinFF that handles conversions from formats like ogg to MP3 and most anything, and now with the TiMidity to convert MIDIs to WAV, that steve was so invaluable in helping me install, I’m almost covered for anything… might just install Winamp and VLC, though I had a dumb experience with VLC messing up when converting WMV video files to MPG format, so I have a little thing about VLC now… WinFF does an amazing job in batch conversions and one to one conversions in a quick, effortless transition… plus Audacity is so great… I just started getting in to the effects, running sound effects clips in reverse, etc., etc… I made a great 3.5 minute compilation of opening song clips and sound effects that just comes across as insane.

I was considering going back to that old Beatles album in Audacity to try to run that part about Paul backwards to see if it really said he is dead (silly)… people only wished they had something like Audacity on a home computer back when that album came out… which song was that?

But I’m just experiencing this problem with whatever is keeping this PC from doing streaming desktop audio recording and now this problem with the mic… one of the deals with installing Audacity on this PC was supposed to be because it would handle things like streaming desktop audio recording better than Mac handles it.

Thanks,

digiday

13

My preferred method of sending media via e-mail is just to include a link. For example:



“Hi Flossy, turn on your computer sound then click HERE”

14

I beg to disagree… best of two worlds would be Mac and Linux :stuck_out_tongue:

15

steve and bgravato,

Ideally, it would be the best of 3 worlds, Mac, Windows and Linux… and even that doesn’t cover all of the worlds… there’s also GNU, Unix, Solaris, Umbuntu, Debian, BeOS, OS2, MS-DOS, OpenBSD, Really aBFD and Really aBMFD… I think those last two are still in development… plus just a few others at the link below… I think I’d run out of space for computers if I were to try to have one of each… studio apartments just aren’t built for this…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems

And as for steve’s trick to get unwilling friends to click on his links, that would be like handing someone a chunk of unidentifiable brown stuff and saying “here, eat this”… I don’t know anyone around anymore who likes to just blindly click on links that say “click HERE”… except me of course, and I did laugh very hard at your link… I like the funky disco backbeat that accompanies the barnyard singers… when I laughed I went “baaaa”.

Is Flossy a dentist or a rancher?

PS: That’s a pretty nifty trick with “audacity.easyspacepro.com”… is that only for important people?

digiday

16

Making something “auto-play” is like saying “here eat this” but denying the recipient the opportunity to refuse. :open_mouth:

On my laptop I can run Ubuntu (main OS), Vista, XP, Ubuntu (experimental).
Vista is set up as a “dual boot” option (it was pre-installed on the laptop and I’ve retained it for testing purposes).
XP and an experimental build of Ubuntu are installed as “virtual machines” (using VirtualBox) and run inside my main Ubuntu OS.
Many modern processors include support for “hardware virtualization” which enables virtual machines to run at full speed (as if they were the only operating system installed). My laptop’s processor does not support hardware virtualization, so there is a slight performance hit, but both XP and the experimental Ubuntu build still run well enough to be usable (I use them mostly for testing Audacity).

17

Hey stevo,

steve wrote:
On my laptop I can run Ubuntu (main OS), Vista, XP, Ubuntu (experimental).
Vista is set up as a “dual boot” option (it was pre-installed on the laptop and I’ve retained it for testing purposes).
XP and an experimental build of Ubuntu are installed as “virtual machines” (using VirtualBox) and run inside my main Ubuntu OS.

Talk about multiple personalities… is your computer named “Sybil ?”…
click here for unidentifiable chunks of brown stuff/Sybil info

steve wrote:

digiday wrote:
that would be like handing someone a chunk of unidentifiable brown stuff and saying “here, eat this”…

steve wrote:
Making something “auto-play” is like saying “here eat this” but denying the recipient the opportunity to refuse.

Personally, I’m forced to eat very identifiable, undesirable chunks of brown stuff and denied the opportunity to refuse every day… it’s called “my life”.

And speaking of multiple personalities, that other digiday posted this thread under “Audio Processing”… not sure if you already saw it…
click here to go to an unidentifiable chunky brown place on this forum

digiday

18

I’ve replied by PM (see link to “messages” at top of page).