Recording Phases

Each recording is performed as a sequence of phases. The seqence of phases is shown in fig. 5.

A modal prompt display means that the prompt item is shown, but marked as inactive, e.g. by using greyed-out text, low resolution images or a disabled audio button. The default setting is to have modal prompt display during the prerecording and postrecording phases, and an active prompt display during recording. The attribute promptphase of a <section> element determines the start of an active prompt display, and it overrides the default setting.

IDLE

no recording, red light, prompt item is only displayed if the attribute promptphase is set to idle.

PLAYPROMPT

the prompt is playing.

PRERECORDING

recording, yellow light, modal prompt item display.

RECORDING

recording, green light, active prompt item display.

POSTRECORDING

recording, yellow light, modal prompt item display.

A prerecording phase is useful to either record environment noise prior to the main recording, or to give the speaker a precisely delimited time to prepare the utterance. A postrecording phase is most commonly used to avoid signal truncation due to clicking the stop button too early.

Figure 5: Recording phases

The timing for time-dependent prompts has to be set to appropriate values by the script author, e.g. to make sure that the recording time is sufficient for prompt playback and recording.