Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Problem:
When I click on a sound object (in a .doc file) OpenOffice tries to open it itself rather than with my default media player. How do I change this?

OS:
Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon (and occasionally Gentoo).

sekinto wrote:When I click on a sound object (in a .doc file) OpenOffice tries to open it itself rather than with my default media player. How do I change this?

I don't have your OS, but on my WinXP machine it depends on the sound file's format and on how I have my sound files associated with different players. Just running a quick test with Word 2003 and OOo 2.3.1, using Insert> Object in Word, I find that in Writer, MP3s are played by IrfanView, WMA by Windows Media Player, but WAV files are played in OOo by the internal OOo media player even though they're associated with IrfanView.

What do you mean by OOo "tries to open it"?
Why do you want it to open in your default media player?
What is your default media player?

It could also depend on how the file was inserted or embedded in the document. Is the .doc file one you created, or was it sent by someone else? If it's one you created, did you create it in Writer? How exactly did you insert the file?

By "tries to open it" I mean OpenOffice tries to open it with Writer which just shows messy characters.
I want to open it with my default media player to I can listen to it of course.
My default media player is VLC.
The document was made by someone else in MS Office.
I'm not possitive, but I'm guessing it is a .wav file.

Any other information you need?

sekinto wrote:By "tries to open it" I mean OpenOffice tries to open it with Writer which just shows messy characters.

Well, this still doesn't describe what's going on. "OpenOffice tries to open it with Writer" doesn't tell me whether you already have the .doc file open in Writer, for example, or whether you're double-clicking on the .doc file which launches Writer; does a document window open? Are you double-clicking on the file icon in the document, or is there anything to click? What if you right-click on it and choose Activate Contents? "Messy characters" doesn't tell me anything either.

sekinto wrote:The document was made by someone else in MS Office.

If it's made in Office 2007, there might not be a way yet for Writer to work with this type of file.

sekinto wrote:I'm not possitive, but I'm guessing it is a .wav file.

Assuming you have the document open in Writer, right-click on the sound object and choose "Edit package." You should see a little window open up with two panes, the file in the left one. You should be able to choose File> Save content and select a location to save the embedded sound file, so you could play it from there.

Does that work?

foxcole wrote:Well, this still doesn't describe what's going on. "OpenOffice tries to open it with Writer" doesn't tell me whether you already have the .doc file open in Writer, for example, or whether you're double-clicking on the .doc file which launches Writer; does a document window open? Are you double-clicking on the file icon in the document, or is there anything to click? What if you right-click on it and choose Activate Contents? "Messy characters" doesn't tell me anything either.

As I already told you, it happens when I click the sound object in the .doc file. I am double clicking, there is no "activate contents" option under right click. Messy characters are characters that can not be read by the program so they just appear as solidified question marks.

foxcole wrote:If it's made in Office 2007, there might not be a way yet for Writer to work with this type of file.

It is not a .docx file, just a .doc. And I'm almost certain it was made in Office 2003.

foxcole wrote:Assuming you have the document open in Writer, right-click on the sound object and choose "Edit package." You should see a little window open up with two panes, the file in the left one. You should be able to choose File> Save content and select a location to save the embedded sound file, so you could play it from there.

That option does not exist when right clicking. Also I would rather not have to save the sound in a separate file before I play it. I would rather just open it (there are a lot of sound objects on the page and saving all of them as separate files would take way to long).

sekinto wrote:As I already told you, it happens when I click the sound object in the .doc file. I am double clicking, there is no "activate contents" option under right click.

There should be, if this is open in Writer and the object is a properly embedded sound object.

But that makes me wonder, where did you get your 2.3.1 version? Some Ubuntu distros are known to be buggy, and the usual advice to those Ubuntu users is to ditch their current installation and download the official version from http://www.OpenOffice.org. Please let me know if this is the case and if that fixed the problem.

Another possibility is that e-mail has corrupted the file. Some e-mail applications add or remove data from the file header in an attachment, effectively corrupting the file for other e-mail clients. The easiest way to test that is to have the sender upload the .doc file to a site such as http://www.mediafire.com/ and e-mail you the link.

foxcole wrote:That option does not exist when right clicking.

That tells me the object is not rendered as a properly embedded sound object.

But if the file was properly inserted by the usual method in Word, it was inserted as an OLE object. OLE objects require an editor program for that file type to be installed on your computer, even though media files are meant to open in media players. (Windows computers come bundled with Sound Recorder, which is pretty well hidden and most people don't realize they have. Word's help file for Windows specifically says this file is required in order to embed a sound file.) Do you have a sound recorder or editor installed?

sekinto wrote: Also I would rather not have to save the sound in a separate file before I play it. I would rather just open it (there are a lot of sound objects on the page and saving all of them as separate files would take way to long).

Of course, that's understandable! But this is a user-to-user forum (please read the Survival Guide!) and as much as I'd like to, I unfortunately can't work miracles for you. All I can do is try to find a way for you to be able to hear the sounds. The file you're trying to work with contains some kind of anomaly that I can't reproduce in Windows, so we might have to look at alternatives while trying to figure out the source of the problem.

Usually the way to extract embedded files is to save the .doc as .odt and open the .odt file with an archive utility such as 7-Zip. But that's not a useful method for sound files, evidently, at least in my tests, because the file type is not indicated on the embedded files. They're just renamed to Object 1, Object 2, etc. with no indication of file format, so that isn't a viable method especially if you're working with a number of objects of uncertain format.

At this point I'm hoping that installing OOo from OpenOffice.org or installing a sound editor takes care of your problem... at least to allow Writer to be able to recognize those embedded sound objects correctly.

Well I know the file works. Because it is on a server and other people have downloaded it (I did not recieve it via e-mail).

I'm completely removing OpenOffice with my package manager and I'll post again once I have the official release installed.

Thanks for your help (and I just realized that you live in Minneapolis, so do I).

Okay, I downloaded the latest version straight from the website. But when I click on the object it still trys to open it in Writer still and it looks like this:

RIFF#�##WAVEfmt ########"V##"V######fact####��##data��##�����RIFF#�##WAVEfmt ########"V##"V######fact####��##data��##�����