Re: some sounds for Gnome

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

Conrad,

These are great.  It is nice to have some new sounds for GNOME.

A few thoughts:

1) File names:  Since sounds generally are created in a batch of
similar-sounding sounds (essentially sound themes), it seems natural to   
name each theme and then name the files accordingly. So if you name the   
sound theme 'subtle', then the files are 'subtle-error.wav',
'subtle-warning.wav', etc.  This would allow a user to easily set all the  
sounds to a certain theme without having to worry about directories or    
different files with the same name.  It would also make packaging and 
distribution easy since they all install in the same paths without
file name collisions.

2) Packaging:  Do these belong in gnome-audio in CVS?  Should they
be shipped as part of gnome-audio-extras?  Sounds tend to pretty big
(probably >1MB per theme), so we presumably want to have one default theme
that ships with GNOME and then the others go into gnome-audio-extras or a
similar package.

3) Licenses: What licenses are appropriate for GNOME sounds?  I noticed
that gnome-audio and gnome-audio-extras do not contain any license in
them.  I don't believe the FSF has any license which is
appropriate.  Should we use the OPL
(http://opencontent.org/opl.shtml)?  Are there any other free/open
licenses which are suitable for sounds?

4) Metadata: It would be very nice if we could store copyright and
licensing information in the actual audio files.  Does WAV or other sound
formats allow this?

5) Events List: We need a list of events and associated sound file names
which would define a complete sound theme.  Looking at the sound capplet,
how about we start with:
  Panel->Expand				panel/<theme>-expand.wav
  Panel->Collapse			panel/<theme>-collapse.wav
  GNOME sys event->Login		<theme>-login.wav
  GNOME sys event->Logout		<theme>-logout.wav
  GNOME sys event->Informational Mess.	<theme>-info.wav
  GNOME sys event->Warning Mess.	<theme>-warning.wav
  GNOME sys event->Error Messages	<theme>-error.wav
  GNOME sys event->Question Dialogs	<theme>-question.wav
  GNOME sys event->Miscellaneous	<theme>-miscellaneous.wav
  UI event->Action Button Click		gtk-events/<theme>-clicked.wav
  UI event->Menu Item Activation	gtk-events/<theme>-activate.wav
  UI event->Check Box Toggled		gtk-events/<theme>-toggled.wav
Are we missing any here?

Dan


On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Conrad Parker wrote:

> I've made a few sounds to replace some of the Gnome defaults. They
> are available, along with some more info, at:
> 
>   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~conradp/sounds/gnome-audio/
> 
> Hopefully you'll find them a bit more subtle than the current ones.
> They have a consistent feel, a kind of whooshing metallic sound like
> in some games. The panel/expand.wav sounds great through a subwoofer
> ;)
> 
> Please try them out and let me know what you think. If nothing else,
> you can spend your Sunday playing with the panel (collapse! expand!)
> and choosing "Log Out? No" over and over again, like I've done ...
> 
> (nb. these sounds are entirely original, and I'm releasing them
> freely. They were even created in Gnome, with free software :)
> 
> Conrad.