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Great idea, fly in the ointment

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Audio Integrity Links Enhancement to Prompt Builder
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3/27/07 9:01 PM
Folks,

In dealing with a big project, recording audio and getting it from media is always a time consuming task.

Is there anyway, you can on top of the "prompt builder in 5.x" provide a facility to point to where a media directory is and check every link to see if it exists according in according to Audium Audio References. You can run into issues of mapping the physical clip to the virtual reference in audio and errors occur and tracking them down.

Our projects huge, over 1400 clips so its a big task.

You could really add some huge value here providing some integrity checking of audio against the URI and checking the physical clip exists and reporting back if its there or not. If they are all correct we can be confident the app has all the audio references perfectly in place.

Thoughts!
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Great idea, fly in the ointment
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3/28/07 2:08 AM as a reply to Anonymous.
Karl,

Great idea. It's been on our list for a while; however, check this small detail out --

With traditional IVR development this works great because resources were mapped directly, but it doesn't work so easily in a W3C HTTP type environment where everything is a URI.

URI's are relative from the server fetching -- which is the voice browser. So, if you ran this operation from a PC that Studio is on, or even if you ran it from the Call Services server (which is usually separate from Studio), neither validation would be valid because URI's are relative from the server fetching the URI.

Make sense?

I'm sure there is a way around this but it'd be a utility that would have to run from the voice browser to be valid. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Cory
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RE: Great idea, fly in the ointment
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3/31/07 3:14 AM as a reply to Anonymous.
Well as you know Cory, files are usually distributed onto a media server

so if there is even an option to put in a URI or file/// check just to test each audio name and location into the directory folders exists that would be good.

keep it simple though

Just loop through the audio inc any folder paths and ask the developer the base file or local uri test path (they can enter it) prior to check.

then a check / test button, and if anything is a problem a list comes back after the process has run against each item in the prompt audio wav table.

God that would have made our lives so much easier.

I might even try and write some java this week to do that.
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Let's keep brainstorming
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3/31/07 3:36 AM as a reply to Anonymous.
Karl,

I appreciate your thoughts, but based on your recommendation I would assume that you're looking for another check besides "will this work in production"?

The only way you can verify if something will work in production and be certain of it is to run a file-check utility programmed with the URLs from the actual voice browsers. Just because box A can get to box B and box C, doesn't mean that box C can get to either A or B. Doesn't work in the networking world.

If your use case is "tell me if I have the following files (URL1, 2, 3) on server A" such that they are spelled correctly, then there is a case to do something from Studio. BUT, that's of limited value in giving you any level of confidence that it will work in production, however.

This also doesn't work for any dynamically specified audio files... eeek!

Cory
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RE: Let's keep brainstorming
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4/2/07 7:41 PM as a reply to Anonymous.
Hi Karl and Cory,

There is an existing enhancement request in our issue-tracking system, CSCzc10324, that is very similar to what you have been discussing in this thread. That request is entitled, "Audium Studio should include a scan for media files" and recommends that Studio include the ability to scan a local directory to ensure that all audio files specified in the call flow (looking at only the filename portion of URIs) are present in that directory.

This request has been updated to indicate Karl's interest in this as well.

Regards,
Vance
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