Re: Sound Events

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

Michael> are there any plans to include "sound events" in gnome ?

Yes.

Michael> i.e. when closing a window or so

I find this a bizarre request, but I don't see why it couldn't be
done.


The basic idea, as I see it, is to have two kinds of sound
applications:

1. Those which intrinsically deal with sound, for instance a
synthesizer program.  These should deal directly with whatever sound
protocol we choose (I definitely think we should use a networked sound
system).

2. Those for which audio is an extra.  I think these applications
should work by just posting events whenever something "interesting"
happens.  Then people who are interested in sounds can run a special
application (of type #1) that listens for events, and plays the
appropriate sound when something happens.

One detail to work out is how to present configuration of the
event->sound mapping to the user.  This shouldn't be overly hard.  It
could either be done globally (by registering events) or
per-application (by writing a common sound config dialog and then
having the app communicate its configuration to the event/sound
program via CORBA).

For the event backplane I picture a daemon running the CORBA event
service.  We'll just define a standard format for the kinds of events
we care about.


This has all been talked about before.  Look back through the list
archives for details.


Hopefully someday soon I'll get a chance to actually work on the CORBA
stuff.  I'm optimistically planning to write the event backplane
first.

Tom