Intermittant Sound Error (and fix)

On several computers in the department this week previously functioning experiments started crashing with no error message - sometimes. Further investigation showed that the problem is the pyo sound library. I don’t know what’s wrong with it or why the error only occurs sometimes, but it occurs with the most minimal of scripts.

The easiest fix for this is to switch to pygame instead. Unfortunately pygame is not being shipped with the latest version of PsychoPy. Fortunately pygame is one of the few python libraries that comes with a windows installer so rectifiying that isn’t too much of a problem. In the wizard you will need to change the install location to wherever PsychoPy is installed and of course you will need to change your Preferences to make sure that it is then used.

I hope that makes sense and if anyone figures out what the cause of the intermittent error is then let me know, because I can’t figure it out for the life of me!

Best,
Becky

PS. If for some reason you have two versions of Python installed you need to make sure that you install pygame into the PsychoPy install only for some reason having it installed in both locations causes a conflict. If that happens run the pygame installer and click the option to remove pygame and reinstall it only in PsychoPy version.