Audio pronunciation button

[hasen]

I recently upgraded to the new Pleco and I can't find the button to play the audio to listen to the pronunciation of a word I have looked up. With the old Pleco I used to have it set with pinyin not displayed so it was merely characters and if I did not know the pronunciation I would press the play audio button....but that seems to now be gone?? Now the only way to hear the word seems to be to manually select the character and then extend the range to both or however many characters in the word and then press hear audio.

Its really long winded now and I've no idea why anyone would want to remove the play audio button...?

How can I get the audio button to appear all the time again?

 

[mikelove]

The button should appear at the top of the dictionary definition screen, next to the Pinyin. Is there no audio icon there?

 

[matthiash]

Same here; while lots of example sentences all have the audio play button, it disappears in the flashcard/Quiz -mode, why though?

 

[hasen]

It only appears in the top sidebar if I select a character.

Normally there is just the search box and next to that, C/E button, edit entry button, add flashcard button and the up down arrows. In the entry area there is just DICT; STROKE; CHARS; WORDS; SENTS. There are no other buttons when I look up characters in the dictionary.

 

[mikelove]

This isn't actually a bug so much as a feature we haven’t bothered to implement yet. Every screen we implement live / tracking TTS on actually takes a lot of work - synchronizing the UI / preventing things from interfering with each other / etc - and since example sentences in flashcards are hidden by default anyway, we didn't feel that getting it working for those was a big priority. We will probably add support for that in one of our next few 3.x updates, which are focused heavily on flashcards.

 

[hasen]

Not quite sure what you mean, this used to be a feature and now its gone. All it is is a play audio button next to the characters for each dictionary entry.

 

[mikelove]

Ah, sorry, I was addressing matthiash's problem and didn't realize yours was still a different one.

So there's no audio button next to the Pinyin in the header at the top of the dictionary entry? Are you using iOS 7 or an earlier version?

 

[hasen]

Well pinyin is disabled since I don't like it. I prefer to listen to the pronunciation and look at the characters. In the old Pleco this was fine but now there is no audio button.

 

[hasen]

Hmm yes that's confirmed, if I enable pinyin then the audio button is there but if I disable pinyin there is no audio button! Surely without pinyin I need the audio even more - not the other way around! Can this be fixed please?

 

[mikelove]

Possibly - not a very popular option (in fact I thought we'd removed it in 3.0) but if we're going to keep offering it then it would make sense to put the audio button at the end of the headword instead for people who chose to use it.

In the meantime, one thing that might help a little would be to set the pronunciation system to Zhuyin instead of Pinyin, assuming you don't read Zhuyin - that will at least make it a little less distracting (and still give you the audio button). There's a separate option to hide pronunciations for example sentences so you won't have it taking up space in those, only in the header.

 

[hasen]

Ok yes zhuyin works quite well in the meantime but it would be nice to have an audio only option for completion. I guess its not a popular option since only people more advanced that are using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries and are well beyond the "crutch" of pinyin would need it. You have to be very familiar with the sounds of Chinese to know exactly what sound is being said without the pinyin. Anyway, thanks for the workaround in the meantime since I do not read zhuyin as you say.

 

[mikelove]

No problem! Glad that that proved a partial solution at least.