Pachyderm testing

I have been doing some testing of Pachyderm Multimedia online application.

My first experience has been positive. It is very intuitive and easy to use. One of the templates I used was the phone Dial template but found it redundant having to load 2 images, one for a full size image and one for a thumbnail. Adding URL links is straight forward.

My first two sets turned out very nice. I had created one about the Cleveland Ohio Cultural Gardens. It had three pages linked to it. My second was about my passion of motorcycles also produced positive results. It had 11 pages linked from it. Both sets had URL links that worked.

My next step was to add sound to the motorcycle project. This is where things got pretty tough. Pachyderm is not able to use WAV files. I had used sound recorder to produce two clips of my narration. I also found wav files of desired sound effects. Pachyderm will use only mp3 or swf files for audio. My experience told me that the swf files would be smaller than mp3.

Here is a comparison:
Original file WAV: 3,877 KB
Converted to SWF: 187 KB
Converted to MP3: 225 KB

So I converted all my wav files to swf. I imported some test files into Pachyderm. They loaded just fine and I tagged them accordingly. However, when I went to test the pages the swf files came in with 2 copies. It would auto play right away. The first copy would play followed by the second copy about 3 second later. There was also no play, volume or pause control. I searched online at the Pachyderm site and also on Google. I could not figure out why this was happening. I sent an email to Pachyderm's help page.

Finally, I converted my wav files into mp3 files. I then removed the swf files and replaced them with the mp3 files. To my surprise it worked! The audio file would not play until I clicked on the play button. Only one copy of the file played. I could pause, reset and play the audio.

About 4 hour after sending a email to pachyderm I received a response. It confirmed that it was the swf files that caused the problem. Why does pachyderm list swf as a compatible file is beyond me.

I used Sound Recorder to capture my voice for two clips. I then downloaded Power Sound Editor to resize my imported sound clips and edit the length of each. The only issue with Power Sound Editor is that it will only export as wav files. Not compatible with Pachyderm. So I downloaded Media Center which I them used to convert the wav files to mp3. Power Sound Editor and Media Center are both free programs.

Next up will be trying videos in pachyderm. It should be interesting.

DJ