[Usability] sound events in gnome

["Sven" <sven lug-dorsten gmx de>]

Hi list,

iam a gnome user for 2 years now, i've seen lots of things that improved
dramatically in that time. But one thing that has never changed was the
sound events handling. I've got some things to complain about.

The sound events dialog-design.
The tab "general" doesnt give a feedback to the user if the soundsystem
works. No diagnostic is possible there. No configuration is possible to make
esd connect sound card A or B or use a network connection to play elsewhere,
or choose to play stereo or surround sound. How about a button "test" that
plays a sound. Also its confusing that there is another dialog "Multimedia
Systems Selector", users dont know how thats related and it does occupy
another line in the huge desktop-preferences menu for nothing.

The tab "Sound events" opens up much to small, and every section is opened
by default - games on top. Most time i dont want to change the
gnome-game-sounds. I want to change start sounds or warning sounds. They
have to be on top in that list due to importance.

Why are only so few options in the "Sound events"-dialog, lots of projects
like gaim have their own sound-selection dialogs because the gnomes one is
so bad and doesnt integrate well. Come on guys you have gconf, why dont you
use that?

And then, in the tab "System Bell" one can choose to "Sound an aubible
bell", well its activated here but i never heard that bell.

Additionally i can imagine a much better file chooser dialog for choosing a
sound file than that standard gnome dialog. At the moment a user has to open
the dialog with "browse", browse to audio files and choose one, then he can
test what it sounds like. Thats way to complicated if u want to check 10
files or more. Nautilus sound preview in icon view does the job, but drag
and drop works only for the adress field, not for the lists element itself
like a drap and drop should work.

What if a user inserts a cd with 1000 sound files, he opens the dialog and
browses to the sound files he likes with the file open dialog. He chooses
the file and removes the cd - gnome should be that intelligent to copy files
from removable medias to a temp directory if the user is not.

Gnome sound events still only work with wav files and if i choose a ogg, it
tells me that this isnt a valid wav file, ugly thing to force users to stick
with wav files. Wouldn't it be better to load a 200kb ogg instead of 2MB wav
at the moment of gnome-start?

anybody working in that field?

regards, Sven Jaborek