Hi there guys.
(first post, yay!)
I did the sounds for KDE 4 within the Oxygen project, and if I’m not imposing I’d like to share with you a few lessons learned from past projects creating sound themes:
-Sounds must have a reason to exist. Judge this well, if a sound has no reason to exist, don’t even create it. (most important lesson learned from KDE, it has far too many sounds enabled on the default install and that’s partially my fault)
-Sounds should never under any circumstance distract the user from the task at hand.
-Sound should aid usability, they should mean something to both the user and the environment.
-Find a theme and stick to it (yes, you can make this an oriental cliché, however, the less sounds “throw” at the user, lesser is the risk of that happening.)
-BE MINIMAL
@Lexen: you’re off to a great start there, mate. if you want it to sound “happy” always end on a higher note in relation to the penultimate one. (advertisers love using that trick in commercial jingles).
To make it sound real add some reverb to the sound, reverb is like a very very short echo that will give you the idea of “space”. If the flute is sounding ‘thin’ add a very light chorus effect to the sound. (careful with the trimming, don’t cut the sounds as soon as they end, let it breathe)
Here’s the problem with the rain: the logon sound has to be short, and that won’t give the listeners brain time to recognize that sound as “rain” it can sound to the listener as anything from simple white noise to a crowded street, you’re leaving perception to chance.
DarkWyrm was spot on. Less is more. If I could be so bold as to share with you guys what I think would be a I believe would be a reasonable sound list it would be:
Logon, Logoff, USBin, USBout, Error, Info1, Info2.
These last two sounds should exist but shouldn’t be assigned to anything, leave that to the user to assign to IM and Email (thus two of them!). And don’t assume emails only popup every now and then, you have no idea if those 20 mailing lists are in digest mode or the guy is getting each message at a time. And although you could assume most people are sensible…wait…no, you can never assume that. 
On a side note: kudos for the vibe you guys got going as a community.
Cheers,
npovoa
Ps: If overhead is a problem try to avoid Midi (since it’s unpredictable how it will sound on someone else’s computer) and look into Trackers, .mod’s are very light. Most computer games out there use trackers for the sound tracks. It’s light, fast and the processing power to get it going is residual.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker )
