I have no problems with audio play back or initializing. However, when I attempt to select a part of the audio with the cursor the red indicating line always selects 0.5 seconds too late, although the annotation is lined up with the location i have clicked. When the selection is played it plays back from 0.5 after the selection until the end.
When I export my annotations they are aligned 0.5 seconds early as well. I have no idea what is causing this. Please let me know if this requires further clarification.
This is probably an artifact of JMF (Java Media Framework) on Linux, although this doesn’t seem to happen always. There are probably no error messages, but you could check that via View->View Log…
We plan to work on an alternative media framework for Linux, but cannot indicate exactly when.
I’m using ELAN 4.6.2 on Linux OpenSuse 13.1. It’s working fine with audio playback and everything, but there is one issue that seems broadly similar to what is described above. Some annotations seem to get out of sync with the audio: they look OK when aligned with the waveform, they play OK when the eaf file is opened on a Windows machine, but whenever I play them on my PC, they would extend some interval (usually around second) beyond their endpoint. Although it doesn’t affect all annotations, it’s still enough to make transcribing unworkable. I’m also having trouble with the red indicating line in Annotation Mode: whenever I play a selection, the selection is played OK, but the line jumps about a second ahead and waits for the audio to catch up.
Is there anything I could do to solve these problems, or should I wait for the bright future when ELAN will have switched away from JMF?
This all sounds like JMF glitches and I’m afraid there’s not much that can be done about it. At least, I don’t know what can be done about it; I think it has even become more difficult to get JMF on Linux working at all the past few years.
We are working on a version of ELAN that uses VLC as a player via a Java library, VLCJ. It is already clear that that solution isn’t entirely without problems either (we’re in the process of compiling a list of known issues) but hopefully it’ll perform better than JMF and hopefully it will be easier to get it working.
This will probably be in the next ELAN release.
