audio subsystem initialization checks | Voters

audio subsystem initialization checks

under review

Matthew Carlson

I would like to see more flexibility in performing these checks. I have two suggestions:

For tasks where audio playback and/or recording occur on multiple displays and/or in multiple tasks, it's a bit cumbersome for participants to keep repeating the initialization checks. If they could be done once at the beginning of the experiment, that would help streamline things.
I do research on bilingualism and with populations of varying literacy. Sometimes we want to control what languages participants are exposed to in the task, so the flexibility to present the checks in different languages would be crucial for these studies. Where literacy is low, it would be convenient to present the instructions for these tasks auditorily, although that's a bit of a catch-22, if we're using audio to check and see if the audio is working. But anything that would move in that direction would be helpful!

Thanks

September 28, 2023

Jade Pickering (Head of Product)

Hey everyone, I've just merged two requests together as they both touch on language and localisation issues.
The first round of planned improvements to the subsystems went out today in terms of streamlining the experience, which you can read about in our Release Notes.
There's more to come with the subsystems though, and I'd definitely like to incorporate the flexibility of language into those changes.

Jade Pickering (Head of Product)

Merged in a post:

Customise microphone and audio check

Célia Richy

So far microphone and audio check are automatically triggered and only exist in English. This is great! But it would be even better if we could customise the language to make it adequate for non-English speakers.

July 24, 2024

Jade Pickering (Head of Product)

marked this post as

under review

Hi Matthew! Thanks for your suggestions.
I'm in the process of doing a bit of improvement work on our subsystem initialisations. I'll take your comments into account!
For your first point, you can already achieve this. By default, the initialisation occurs once before each task at the moment for browser-permission related reasons. If the participant refreshes the page, or you're running a longitudinal study, browser permissions can sometimes reset so we've done it that way to be the safest (full technical details are here: https://support.gorilla.sc/support/troubleshooting-and-technical/technical-checklist#autoplayingsoundandvideo).
However, you can switch off all the unnecessary initialisations at any time. Go to the settings on the left, then the subsystems tab, and you can toggle anything off that you don't need for that particular task.