I’m assuming that Haiku system sounds are planned for the R1 release and was curiour if they’re currently being developed and will they be available for the beta?
I would appreciate some new system sounds too. There seem to be a new bunch of them, close to the kinds MS Windows has. They’re also useful for other programs, like BeShare and mail with spam detection. If you install those programs, you’ll see more entries in the Sounds preferences that could be filled.
system sounds could be amazing. who would make them?
We didn’t find someone with the sound design skills in Haiku team yet. Feel free to contribute something, if you think you can match the Haiku look and feel with sound waves!
Hmm… well, if the community would be okay with it, I’d be willing to give this a try. I play keyboard, and am somewhat okay with digital audio. What scheme should the sounds try to follow?
It would be interesting to pull system sounds from Amiga, Mac, Windows, and reuse them for Haiku.
Perhaps try a few themes. Classical music is always good, and copyright free. Sound effects are another category, maybe subcategories such as natural noises or percussion could work. Male and Female voices describing the events are other possibilities.
Here is a list of sound events that you could fill:
- BeShare-DLFinished
- BeShare-InactivChat
- BeShare-Name Said
- BeShare-NoComplete
- BeShare-Private Msg
- BeShare-PrivateWndw
- BeShare-ULFinished
- BeShare-ULStarted
- BeShare-WatchedUser
- Error notification
- Important notification
- Information notification
- Progress notification
- Key down
- Key repeat
- Key up
- Mouse down
- Mouse up
- Beep
- Startup
- Window activated
- Window close
- Window minimized
- Window open
- Window restored
- Window zoomed
- New Mail
- Crash Detected
- Alex
P.S. How about clock chimes or voice announcement of the hour and quarter hours?
Voices would make it difficult for internacionalisation…
Well, something influenced by those might work, but I can’t exactly clone those, as it’d probably end up in a copyright complaint or similar where I live.
Great! And thank you for the list – that gives me an idea what we would need, along with the list in the Sounds preferences pane, of course. Something classical or soundtrack like using a strings-esque voice be one idea I could tinker with. Sound effects would be great – and I’ll see what I can do. Haiku’s theme is nature, autumn, leaves, and probably should be light and carry that quality. That said, I wonder what would make a good startup sound? It would need to sound unique from the others. The one for Be was mystique in the way it sounds even today; it is almost like a recut from OS/2 Warp 3 or a short NT4-like sound, and yet it is succinct enough to be a type of boot chime, both at the same time. I doubt anything could top that harmony. It is definitely something to think about. And, I’d love to include voice clips as an alternate set, until I saw this…
… which I think makes an excellent point I hadn’t even considered. Having English clips would present a new challenge for those on Haiku’s l10n team, as they would have to translate and then ship alternate clips with the system, which would take up quite a bit of space (i.e. footprint) on both the CD and disk.
So, overall, if the community would like me to, I’ll definitely post the sounds for sampling, and hopefully, use in the nightlies – as Haiku really needs system sounds!
As they’d all be optional, it wouldn’t really matter – pick a spoken alert that suits you.
Also it would depend how the ‘voice’ is used. There are some rather nice “Voice Oohs” and “Choirs” in most SoundFonts.
I probably have some good facilities for making system sounds – I’ve done quite a bit with Csound, for instance, and play with MIDI a lot. My problem is I have no idea what sort of sounds would appeal! I’ve pretty much avoided them myself, as I tend to find them annoying. [I used to work in a lab with Windows machines that would all announce loudly when they were rebooted…]
Do people have the set of old BeOS optional Startups and System Beeps? I again never found them particularly inspiring, but I suppose I could make them available on BeShare or my site, together with various other sounds I’ve collected over time, so folks could comment here on which they detested or liked…
(Our posts crossed there, I guess…)
I’d certainly be happy to hear some samples! I may get the urge to try myself, too, but the more people have to select from, the better!
IMO, though, there should only be a few, if any, shipped with the nightlies. Most or all should be “user’s choice”. I suspect preferences differ widely [as mine do as I mentioned above]. Maybe a really stunning startup sound or such could become standard, though.
Yes, I have the two default sounds, but I’ll have to figure out how to get them uploaded. Once I have them online, I’ll give a link. Should be legal since Be is gone, it’s for historical reasons and all that.
Okay. Per request of Pete, I’ve uploaded BeStartup.wav and BeBeep.wav to my Dropbox for anyone who doesn’t have a copy of the BeOS. Feel free to listen to these, download them, put them in BeShare, etc…
BeBeep:
BeStartup:
For the conscientious, I think it should be legal, since it is only for preservation or historical/educational purposes. In addition, Be is defunct now, so as long as we acknowledge these sounds are property of Be, I don’t think any former Be employees will mind. And with all that said, hopefully, I can return with an original sound set for Haiku sometime soon. And maybe a cousin of sorts of the Be startup sound for the fun of it. 
Actually, to be clear, I was talking about the “optional” sounds, that I now realize weren’t included in R5 for some reason. I have them in my R4.5 hierarchy. There are 9 “Startup Sounds”, and 15 “System Beeps”. Unfortunately they’re all aiff, which the current nightlies can actually play properly (!), but earlier releases just played white noise. I’ll convert them all to wav before posting them somewhere tomorrow.
(Like you, I suspect nobody is actually going to bother with copyright issues for “fair use”.)
Sure, they’ve been up on my repo for quite a while
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#/pkg/beos_sounds/clasqm/1/0/-/-/1/any
Well, before Haiku was an OS it was a form of Japanese poetry so I would suggest something vaguely oriental…
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My idea for system sounds, since Haiku has a leaf as symbol too is to use nature sounds. For example wind could be used for boot or loading finished, birds chirping for notifications, thunder storm for errors, leaves shaking for windows close etc.
If people like the idea, I might have already most of them to put, and I can give copyright to the project.
Relating classic music, the compositions usually lost the copyright of course, but not the recordings that are a different matter.
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the sounds should not be too extreme. if you open und close windows frequently, and it is some loud sound, you won’t like that for long.
look at the mac osx sounds. those are so smooth, almost silent, but still there. so much pleasure working with that os. i want that on my haiku.
my thoughts exacly. as a media designer, i think the idea is great. nature has the best sounds anyway.
i’d like to propose the idea of sound sets that anyone can make, maybe some archive file that contains every sound file, and that can easily be changed by a dropdown box somewhere in the sound settings. additional sound packs could be installed over a repo.
no idea would be lost, even if it won’t get selected as the main theme.
Sure, they’ve been up on my repo for quite a while
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#/pkg/beos_sounds/clasqm/1/0/-/-/1/any[/quote]
Again, I didn’t mean the standard two sounds. There was a whole bunch of others that were shipped with BeOS up to R4.5. (Maybe they stopped because they were somewhat unimpressed, like me (:-/) Or maybe they were just tight for space.)
Anyway, I’ve put the collection up for your interest at http://users.lmi.net/pete/BeOS_Sounds.zip (1.25MB). I’ve massaged them from the original 44099fps (!) AIFF files to 48000 mp3s, so the zip is about 1/10 the size of the original archive. I think they’re worth listening to, anyway.
[BTW Michel, I had trouble downloading your package above. The site refused to work with BeZilla, and when I went to WebPositive, the hpkg was “downloaded” as a screenful of raw characters! I had to take the URL of that back to BeZilla to get a proper download.
I actually had the same problem with my site and W+. I had to add:
to my (Apache) .htaccess file for W+ to get something it knew about.]
AddType application/x-vnd.haiku-package .hpkg
I apologize that I missed the “optional” part in your earlier post; now I understand what you were/are looking for. I think I still might be able to help out, but the thing is, I don’t have anything before R5 running on anything (i.e. OS is too old). Outside of one old Hewlett-Packard I have sitting around that runs R5, all my other hardware (aside from my Mac collection) is modern. That said, I think I might have a copy of 4.5, and I guess could throw it into the old machine, and/or try VMware… as I doubt anything else would work with that release anymore. If that’s possible, I can try to get to any optional sounds once in there, and then find a way to upload the sound bytes for everyone to hear, etc.
As for the Haiku sound candidates I’ve offered to work on, so far I have been tinkering with several ideas (mainly classical/soundtrack-esque sounds), but it’ll take a while to finish an entire set. Overall, I’m thinking of just doing 2, or maybe 3 sets out of everything that’s been suggested so far, and see what the community thinks of my concept(s) from there once they’re up.