Media Player

Vortec IRC includes a built-in media player. This provides not only a convenient way to listen to music while chatting, but also a way to play sound files to the channel (see /SOUND command).

The Media Player consists of a toolbar with buttons to control playback, a file list, a play list with shuffle option, and settings. Your sound path is defined on the settings page, and only files and folders within that directory will be listed. This format should be very familiar, as is mimics Windows Explorer.

To play a sound file locally so that only you hear it, highlight it from the file list and press the Play Locally button (first button on toolbar). Vortec has built-in support for .wav, .mid. and .mp3 files, but can handle virtually any file type, as I will explain later.

To play a sound to the channel, highlight the file and click the Play button. Pause, Stop, Previous, and Next buttons all behave as you would expect and should be self-explanatory. The last button on the toolbar is the Shade button, which will minimize the Media Player to show only the toolbar. This is very useful especially when playing in play list mode, as you can still control playback without needing to view the entire window.

Play list mode allows you to list several files and play them consecutively. You may also shuffle the order of files by right-clicking the list and selecting "Shuffle". To add files to the play list, go back to the Media Files tab and find the files you want. Right-click each file and select "Send to play list".

The final tab is the Settings tab.

This allows you to specify the root directory of your sound files. There are also several performance options. If you have a slower computer, or if you notice that it takes too long for the media files to list, try checking a few of these options.

I would recommend to never filter file types, except on the fastest computers. Un-checking this option will only list media files supported by Vortec. This also has the added effect of not showing other file types that Vortec would normally be able to handle, like Real Media files, so I would suggest to leave it checked.

Do not use shell icons will prevent Vortec from showing the icon for each filename.

Do not list file type info will suppress the file type description such as "MP3 Format Sound"

Do not list file size will prevent file size info from showing in the list.

All of these options take away a slight amount of overhead when processing the selected file list. The final option, Do not filter file types, removes a great deal of overhead.

There are even more settings for sounds in Client Setup. In the "Other" section you will find the Sound options. These settings are for automatically playing sounds on your own system when someone in the channel plays the same sound.

Enable sounds - allows you to enable or disable sounds altogether.

Ignore if already playing sound causes Vortec to ignore new sounds when a sound file is still playing

Display error... Shows an error message when someone plays a sound that is not found on your system

Display media events shows the Media tag when a sound is played even if there is no message attached. Without this, the Media tag will not be displayed when there is no message, and Vortec will just try to play the sound.

Use closest match uses Soundex algorithms to find the closest match to the filename that was played. For example, if someone plays a sound file named Enya - Orinoco Flow.mp3 and you have a sound file named Enya-Ornoco_Flow.mp3, your sound will play. Notice the different spacing and misspelling.

Use default application... This allows Vortec to handle unsupported file types. Vortec IRC has internal support for *.wav, *.mid, and *.rmi files. When enabled, this option will allow Vortec to attempt to play virtually any type of media file using the file's default application. For example, Real Media files (*.ra, *.ram) will be played using Real Player. If you are having problems with this option, it may be because the file type you are attempting to play is not associated to any application in Windows. In this case, see your Windows Help for instructions on "Associating a file extension with a file type".

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