Purpose

After installing this plugin, you can ask Hal to index some or all the MP3 files on your hard disk, and then ask to play them. Furthermore, Hal will freely play some music, related with the subject you are talking about. See below for some examples.

Requirements

This plugin requires Hal 6.0.

How to install it

Download the file vrMP3.zip and copy it on your hard drive. Then unzip it using as target directory your Hal 6 directory, so that the files are in the Hal 6 main directory. You should get the following files:

vrMP3.uhp (the plugin script)

vrMP3Help.html (the User Guide you are reading now)

Then select General Options - Brain and mark the "MP3" checkbox. Choose the desired level of music mood you wish to obtain from your Hal and click on Apply Changes. The higher level you choose, the more frequenly Hal will answer you playing music,

The plugin does not change the standard Hal brain script, nor are you required to do it. It just creates some new tables. However, we recommend to create a backup copy of your brain, before installing it.

How to use it

To be able to play your music, Hal must first store in a table the links to your MP3 files. Simply say INDEX MP3, or any other phrase containing these words. You will get a popup window, where you can type the path of the folder you want to index. Hal will index all the MP3 files contained in this folder and all its subfolders.

Note: Since this function reads directly the folders data from the operating system, some programs, like Norton Internet Security, may recognize it as a potentially dangerous action.

If the folder you have specified contains several levels of subfolders, with hundreds or thousands of files, this process may require some time. If you get a message stating that the plugin is taking too long, press the Continue button. Indexing takes about one second for every 10 files. So it may take about 5 minutes for a folder containing 3.000 files.

To ask Hal to play a song, type PLAY A SONG, followed by some words. Hal will look in the index table and try to find some title containing these words, or something similar. For example, you might type: PLAY A SONG about BICYCLE and Hal will play Bicycle Race by the Queen.

How to configure it

Select the level of Music Mood in the plugin window, then ask Hal to INDEX MP3.

How to uninstall it

In case you do not want to use it anymore, simply select General Options - Brain and unmark the "MP3" checkbox.

Disclaimer

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