Player

General

The player is used to play the sounds and the music when a key or button is pressed.

In the upper left part of the player, there are three sliders. With them you can control the volumes. The Player remembers the settings for the next start automatically. With the sliders for music and sounds, you can't set the volume higher than defined by the overall volume; so it makes sense to set the overall volume rather high and then set the volumes for music and sounds somewhat lower.

Below, the player shows the current state:

• Which project is loaded?
• Which mode is selected?
• Which elements of the mode are currently played?
• Which music file is currently played?
• Which sounds are currently played?

At the bottom, there are settings for the connection with the Controller. You have to change the ports only if they are already used by another program. You also need to know them if you have to open a firewall. You have to select the IP address if the computer has several addresses (e.g. because it is in several different networks).

On the right-hand side, the player displays the modes in the project in a list. Whenever you select a mode, the top-level elements of the mode are shown with buttons on the right. With these buttons, you can start and stop the elements.

Control

You select the modes and start the elements of the modes with the keyboard by pressing the keys defined in the project, or through the buttons on the right-hand side. You can stop the playing of elements which are endless (like background music) by pressing the key or button again. There are also some predefined keys:

• ESC stopps everything
• Cursor Up increases the overall volume
• Cursor Down decreases the overall volume
• Page Up increases the volume for sounds
• Page Down decreases the volume for sounds
• Ins increases the music volume
• Del decreases the music volume
• Cursor Right plays the next music file in the current list
• Cursor Left plays the previous music file in the current list

You can turn on global key usage in the Extras menu. If it is active, every key press will be considered by the Player, even if the Player window is not currently active.

Messages

The messages window is opened either through the menu or automatically if a warning or error message occurs. The Player outputs such messages if something doesn't fit or has gone wrong. With the filter, you can switch between different categories of messages.

Streaming

Through the menu Extras / Streaming ... you can open a dialog to configure that music and sounds shall be given to an Icecast streaming server. Icecast has to be installed and running, of course. If you want to use MP3 to encode the stream, you have to get the lame encoder yourself (due to legal issues) and copy it into the installation directory of the Ares Player (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Ares\Player_Editor).

The URL for clients is displayed in the lower part of the dialog, but be aware that the IP address could be different if you put the stream into the internet through a router. When streaming, there can be a delay of several seconds until changes to the played elements reach the clients: this is not because of Ares, but because both Icecast and the streaming client buffer the stream for some time and the network may also add to the delay.