Peter Bancroft wrote: TIMER once set going never stops running. You can't turn it off. It's been this way forever. ----------------------------- Yes, I understand that. When I want to "disable" TIMER, I simply set TIMER to some very large value so that my timer routine won't be accessed. When I want to resume TIMER activation, I reset TIMER to the proper value. My question had to do with error messages I got with certain TIMER statements that appear in the reference manual: ON TIMER END, ON TIMER OFF, TIMER(0) OFF, and TIMER OFF. ============================= tedd wrote: Richard: If you are trying to find when a melody is done by using ON TIMER, then you're heading down a complicated road. I suggest that you become familiar with the Apple's Sound Manager. In there, it provides a way for a program to know when a melody is done and much, much more. It's a bit of a steep learning curve, but well worth it if you're doing sound stuff. Besides, using the ON TIMER thing is not only difficult to use for things like that, but can never be turned off. ------------------------------- tedd: In fact, as I mentioned in my first message, I have got TIMER event handling working. Although TIMER event handling cannot be turned off once it is started, one can trick FB into ignoring it by setting the TIMER to a very large value. As for the Sound Manager, I am using it for audio output by Sebastian. Alain Pastor and others suggested that I use SoundChannelStatus as a means to signal when a piece of music has finished playing. However, this failed for me. The reason that I can't use it is that my melodies are stored as strings of data. One character of each pair of characters in the string is used for the frequency of the note and the other character for the duration. The Sound Manager's SndPlay function is accessed for _each note_ as it was done in Hommel's Sound Tutor. Therefore, after each note has sounded, SndChannelStatus would give a signal that the channel is empty. I don't see how I can used the Sound Manager to indicate that the melody is completed because of this. If it were possible to sound the music synchronously rather than asynchronously, then I would have no problem. However, FB^3 apparently plays all music asynchronously via the Sound Manager. Therefore, the entire melody string is read and supplied to the sound queue while the first note is just sounding. Richard