Legal Notice

Audiovisualmagitastic and its accompanying documentation are copyrighted material of Pantera Designs, however it is distributed as freeware. This means that you can copy the program and pass it on to others for everyone to use, but you cannot modify parts of the program to be used for other purposes and distribute it with the Audiovisualmagitastic name (the author has to be bribed for this!). More importantly, please verify that you haven't paid anyone for a copy of this program (we are the developers, and if we're happy to not charge you anything for our work, we don't see why anyone else should). Also if anyone reading this wants to include this program in a compilation or demo disc or network, we would like to be notified.

Requirements

Most requirements depend on what use you have for Audiovisualmagitastic. If you want to display large pictures, be sure to have a sensible amount of RAM. If you want to view good movies, verify that you have a fast playback device to keep the frame rate up. If you want to play back some music, a decent set of speakers with a big sub-woofer is the least you can provide. If you want to read some text, you may want to install some nice fonts for a more pleasant rendition. If you want to use the program as a jump-pad for internet content, you may want (or wish) a stable internet connection. So it's all up to you then.

For your information, this program has been developed on a Windows 98 system, and tested on Windows 95, NT and ME.

For Shockwave Flash animations, you may need to upgrade to the latest Shockwave libraries from http://www.macromedia.com. Also, this program uses Microsoft libraries. If you have messed up your Microsoft Mediaplayer (for whatever reason), chances are that you will have problems with Audiovisualmagitastic. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/ and take a look at their multimedia libraries. Please note that Shockwave and Shockwave Flash are the copyright of Macromedia, and Microsoft Mediaplayer is copyrighted to Microsoft.

Installation

This program is for Windows 95 or later and it comes in a zip file. You first have to unzip the program using Winzip or similar. Once the installation files are extracted, all you have to do is to run the setup.exe file that you just extracted and it sets everything up for you. You can select where to put the files, otherwise just keep pressing Next and everything will be done automatically. Setup will create a program group and shortcut in the Start menu from where you can launch Audiovisualmagitastic.

All is set up, on to the program then...

Audiovisualmagitastic is started by clicking the icon which was created in the above installation. When starting the program you'll see a window with a bunch of clickable objects. Don't worry, everything will be made clear. Let us start from the top and work our way to the bottom. There are three menus: from the file menu you can access the setup window, build an HTML page, or exit the program completely; in the View menu you can choose how to view the file-list. The final Help menu lets you see some information about the program version, this help file and the keys you can press during file viewing.

Next on top left is the drive list. Use it to select the drive from which you want to read. Just below is the directory list which shows the directories for the drive you have selected and from which you can select the directory to view. The big box in the middle of the screen is where it all happens. It shows you the files available in the drive and directory that you have selected. By clicking on a file you can view it, hear it or whatever the type of file allows you to do with it. Above it is the path selector. It keeps a record of all the directories you have viewed, and you can select to return to one of them. You can also type in a new path and jump to it instantly by pressing Enter or clicking the Go button.

The framed list on the right of the screen is the file filter. From here you can choose to view particular types of files. The file types are split into four categories : Audio, Video, Picture and Text. When a header is clicked, the file types associated with that category appear. If an item in the file filter is checked, files corresponding with the checked item will be shown in the file list. The Text category offers a further possibility to select more file types. The Add Filter function is provided so that file types not available by default can also be displayed. The files are added by typing in a valid DOS filename (wildcards are recommended) separated by a semicolon, for example : *.nfo;*.bat will add info and batch files to the filters. Please note that unsupported file types will be opened and displayed as text files.

If the All Files item is selected, then the file-list shows the selected directory in its entirety. If you uncheck All Files and click on one of the other options, only files of the selected type will be shown in the file-list. You can choose to view more than one type of file. The number of matching files is shown in the panel just under the filter. The Random button picks a file from the file-list and shows it to you, and the Shuffle button causes the files to be sorted in a random fashion. The Slide Show button starts a slide show launching the files in the file-list one after the other. Clicking this button with the left mouse button causes the slideshow to start from the beginning, while right-clicking start the slideshow from the currently selected file.

About that setup option?

In the setup window which is accessed from the file menu, you can change all the settings for the program. The first option is the thumbnail size where you can tweak the size of the images in the thumbnail view. Just below it is the slide delay where you can set the delay between two files during a slide show. You also have the option to scale the picture files to fit your screen. This can be done separately on pictures smaller or larger than the screen. There is also an option of the video playback size which can be anything from half the default size to full screen playback. 

Timing info is the information about the current position within a movie or audio file, and can be turned on or off. The next option lets you open files with unknown extensions as if they were text files. Furthermore, you can select the font for the text file viewer by clicking on the big button displaying the font name. The final option allows you to select a colour for the background of a GIF image by moving the RGB sliders. The settings are saved once you exit the program completely.

The View Menu

You can view the file list in three different ways. The simplest is the List View which just displays a list of files in alphabetical order. The Detailed View also shows the files in a list, however in this mode each entry is accompanied by file size, modification date and type. The files can be sorted by clicking on the respective header name. Clicking the header with the right mouse button sorts the files in descending order. Lastly, the Thumbnail View shows the files as small pictures representing the actual files.

The Refresh menu refreshes the file list in case that the folder contents were changed while the program was running.

And the media screen?

When you click on a file in the file-list, the media screen appears showing an image, movie or the path of the song or sound that it is playing. Whenever an audio or a movie file are shown, the media screen is closed automatically as the end of the file is reached. You can also close the media screen by clicking on the purple background, double clicking the file output or by pressing the Esc key.

While a picture is being viewed, the right-mouse button brings up a menu which lets you modify the picture. You have the option of modifying the picture colour, rotating or sizing the picture, or applying a deformation effect. You are encouraged to experiment with these effects as they give visual results that will reveal the output better than I can ever explain it here.

HTML files are handled differently from the others in that they are opened in a different screen that behaves as a normal browser. You can switch back and forth between the internet browser and the main program and also have multiple browser windows.

Pictures can be moved around the screen by grabbing them with the left mouse button and dragging them around. Alternatively, they can be moved with the cursor keys, Shift, Ctrl and Alt providing different precision movement. Furthermore, the displayed picture can be docked to the screen edges by pressing Home, End, Insert or Delete.

Saving, Printing, Wallpapering and more

Since the graphic effects in Audiovisualmagitastic have grown up to quite a bit, it has become apparent that these modified pictures might need to be kept for later. So a couple of functions have been intruduced for this purpose. In effect, a picture being viewed on the media screen can be saved to disk, printed in either portrait or landscape mode, copied to the clipboard, deleted from the hard disk, or selected as the desktop wallpaper. These functions can be accessed by clicking the right button on the picture itself.

Playlists

The idea behind playlists is to have the possibility to run a slideshow in a predefined way. Audiovisualmagitatsic currently supports exporting the current file-list as a playlist and playing it back later on without having to search for a particular directory. Currently playlist editing is not supported, but will be available in a future release. However playlists can still be edited by using a text editor such as Microsoft's Notepad that comes with Windows. The Playlist feature can be found in the file menu.

And that CD icon below the file filter?

The CD icon is used to start the CD player. It provides the standard play, pause, previous, next, stop and eject features that any serious compact disc player would have. CD time information is supplied at the top where you can also select the track to play from the total number of tracks available in the inserted it CD.

Inside your PC, no one can hear them scream

The Snatch function is used to grab a file from the current list that you are viewing and put it in the Audiovisualmagitastic directory. A particular use is when viewing the files on a number of CDs for example, if an interesting file comes up, you can snatch it and re-view it later again and again.

HTML Builder

You can build an HTML page from the file menu. This feature allows you to make a quick web page containing links to all the files in the file-list. You get to select the page's title and filename and how many items you want to display in each row. Once you press OK, your web page will be ready.