Update June 2015

We are happy to announce that from ProSelect  2015r2, Ambient Music is now working reliably on Macs. This is due to the conversion of this version to use the latest Cocoa APIs and AVFoundation on OSX.

Previous article (Jan 15,2015)

With the releases of ProSelect 2014r1.6-2014r1.8 (for Mac only), you were no longer able to use the Ambient music feature of ProSelect Pro. This Ambient music feature allows you to setup and play low level background music during your presentations which automatically faded out when the slideshow was started and back in when the slideshow had finished. It works without issue on Windows.

This is a temporary measure until we can provide a stable way to do this on Mac and, once resolved, we will be re-enabling this feature in a future update.

In the meantime, due to popular requests, we have make this option user selectable as of ProSelect 2014r1.9. This is for users who are aware of the limitations and can avoid the circumstances that may lead to a crash. In this newer release, you will find a "Enable Ambient Music" checkbox in Prefererences -> Slideshow. Check this box and read the warning message to re-enable access to the Ambient Music.

Why did we do this?

We found that due to the design of our development environment, opening and closing other windows while using Quicktime to play the ambient music could occasionally result in ProSelect completely crashing.

We switched to using the more efficient VLC libraries to play the music but found that the mac versions of these libraries (written by a third party) had other issues. Namely, ProSelect would crash if you changed the audio output setting during or after playing some music. This meant that an action such as plugging in or removing a HDMI cable, USB audio device or even an external speaker in the headphone jack would cause a crash. 

We are mindful that any crashes during or after a presentation can be seriously disruptive for both the presenter and client not to mention the potential loss of data. So we felt that it was important to configure ProSelect to prevent this from happening.

What are we doing about this now?

We are actively looking at other solutions to this problem. We have a number of options that we are working on but didn't want to hold up releasing any new updates with other minor but important bug fixes until we had resolved this problem.

Playing .mp4 music files

We have found that Quicktime is very inefficient when playing music file formatted in .mp4 format. Likely this is because this format is really designed for movies.

VLC, on the other hand, will handle these easily.  As a result, we have disabled the adding of .mp4 music files into the music resources folder on the Mac. This option is still available on the Windows version which now uses VLC to play all music. If you are a Mac user and already have .mp4 music files loaded in your Setup Music window then we recommend that you replace these with .mp3 or .aac versions of the same track to avoid any problems with the music skipping during the slideshows.  iTunes can be configured to default to these other types and to convert .mp4 music file to the other types.

Playing Video in ProSelect

Both the Mac and Windows versions of ProSelect still use VLC to preview and play videos during the slideshow. As such if you do use videos, you should avoid changing the audio output source (as mentioned above) else ProSelect may crash at that time. Best to close ProSelect before making such changes.

We have also had some reports of similar crashes after an extended period of computer sleep with ProSelect left open. This has not be easy to reproduce and possibly is related to Mac OSX changing or resetting audio sources when this happens. As such, if you are using video in ProSelect, best to set your computer not to go to sleep or close ProSelect before this happens.