Re: System event sounds / audio feedback

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 20:47 +0100, Stéphan Kochen wrote:
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> Hi all,
> 
> 
> With the recent release of PulseAudio 0.9.7, and discussions surrounding
> audio in GNOME, I thought I'd try and see if I could get some movement
> in the system event sounds area as well.
> 
> The event sounds in GNOME, that have been in the gnome-audio package for
> ages now, are simply awesome. During my first days exploring Linux, I
> always had them enabled. As Linux became more and more my primary
> desktop environment, the clicking, crackling, latency and locking
> problems that ESounD produced led me to disable them for a long time.
> 
> But now we have PulseAudio! Hooray! :D
> 
> 
> And things are good... well, a lot better... but:
> 
> 1) Only libgnome-based applications seem to work? Besides non-GTK+
> applications, another example close to GNOME is gcalctool. Libgnome also
> seems to be on the fast track towards deprecation. (?)

See also:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368304

> 2) The number of configurable events is very limited. What about opening
> a folder, closing a window, switching tabs, browsing to a page,
> libnotify notifications, ...?

This needs application support, and widget support. I think you're going
overboard with your examples though. I think you should file bugs
against specific applications that you'd want to support specific
sounds.

Implementing those with the gnome_sound_ API (or the esd API) would be
alright as a stop-gap.

> 3) The event sounds are not bulk configurable, like a GTK+ theme for
> example.

That's because we never had a whole slew of potential replacements. The
current gnome-audio sounds suck (no offense to the original author),
they sound dated, and badly finished. Compare this to the MacOS (even
prior to OSX) or SGI sounds.

> 4) I cannot control the volume of system events.

You can if you use PulseAudio. It's just only accessible with
pavucontrol, not gnome-volume-control.
<snip>
> 1) A replacement for the libgnome could be a GTK+ module, that simply
> hooks signals and plays sounds. Sounds are preloaded by settings-daemon;
> no difference from the current situation there.

See bug above.

<snip>
> 2) More events becomes a problem when thinking beyond just the fixed set
> for a GUI toolkit; about feedback from application specific functions.
> Opening a folder and browsing to a page are good examples of this.
> 
> A possible solution would be to dedicate a GConf directory for sound
> events. Control-center iterates directory entries to find configurable
> sounds and their descriptions. (Short description in the listview, long
> in the tooltip for example.) Applications namespace their event names to
> avoid conflicts.

This sounds like overkill to me, compared to other system sound APIs
available.

> 3) Theming is a matter of defining a format and implementing the
> configuration for it. This could be a dead simple archive containing
> wave or Ogg Vorbis files named after the GConf event names they play for.

Rodney was working on such a spec. But I'll give you £50 if you manage
to create/gather up a sound theme of quality matching the current
gnome-audio sounds, and that's actually shippable without copyright
problems by distributions.

> 4) This is slightly tricky.
<snip>

PulseAudio should give you a separate track for the ESD connected
applications. It's probably a matter of tagging those. Lennart would
know better.

Cheers