What about sounds?

Hey there,
I liked Haiku, this OS have a good graphic desing, but have no sounds, what makes her kinda empty. So please, add sounds. Please and thank you.
Sirently,
Velimir

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You can add sounds yourself to certain events in the prefrences

If you’re wondering where can those sounds be set, please check out this link:

https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/preferences/sounds.html

It could be nice to have at least one default sound available for the startup so that it would be the easy test on standard installation to verify the sound is working (ie no download to do especially when networking is not yet available)

I’ve installed a clean startup sound on my machine and it’s very useful for that purpose (I noticed sometimes the sound card is not recognized at startup even it’s rare, a kind of random behavior…)

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While the Sounds preferences allow setting sounds for several events, they don’t actually work yet… AFAIK only applications registering their event there work, e.g. Vision’s nickname notification.

This is the ticket tracking the (non) progress of the issue: [Edited for the correct ticket…] #15295 (System sounds not played when triggered) – Haiku

There was even an ill fated community initiated system sounds competition a few years ago. You could say the idea was, “create it and they’ll come (to implement the needed infrastructure to play back sound events)”. Didn’t work out…

I imagine, there are bigger fish to fry for the small number of devs. Also, I feel that most prefer their computer to STFU and are therefore even less motivated to work on a feature they detest. :slight_smile:

I’ve archived those: Misc Haiku utilities and ports - Browse /sounds at SourceForge.net

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For reference, in addition to SourceForge, the winning sound theme is found here: artwork/system-sounds/grubs-sparkly-tones at c502c0d4794e7e37f70ea47515491db0ed437113 · haiku/artwork · GitHub

Certain sound events are implemented, but far from all.

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I linked the wrong ticket above and edited it for the correct URL.

Yes. At least Beep works (gets played e.g. when changing volume with the Deskbar replicant), and Startup if the sound is stored on the boot partition, it appears.

Pretty sure atleast the startup one works. But yes, for the rest it is mostly “meh”.

The sound contest was very wierd, had someone in my family who wanted to submit something but simply didn’t bother since… you can’t really vote for how “good” a sound theme is if there is no way to test it.

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I bet! I have Manjaro Linux on another partition, and you can find various users asking in one place or another, how can I turn the stupid beep off? The only thing I like better than for my computer to be quiet, is for someone else’s computer to be quiet.

Agreed. I don’t object to a startup chime, but for the rest the computer must make sounds when I tell it to, not when it feels like it.

Still, it doesn’t send a good message when it looks like we have the structure in place for various beeps and bongs, when we actually don’t. If the non-functioning ones were greyed out in the dialog, this issue wouldn’t keep coming up. Let’s see a mockup:

Screenshot 2024-09-23 at 22.11.35

W-Woah!!!
That’s my, like, first topic, and so far, 10 COMMENTS!? That’s AMAZING!!!

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Wait till someone revives this thread in 2027, and then again in 2031 …

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Adding my comment to the noise! also… welcome @Velimir_Dev!

if the “beep” doesn’t comes from the actual PC buzzer, I will most likely shut that off. (and then possibly disconnect the PC buzzer after I get annoyed by it). But yeah… Haiku could ship at least the tiniest sound file to verify sound card works.

Side note: I still have in my to do list to resurrect an (x86) pc-speaker driver that can at least do basic “songs” :slight_smile:

I think Haiku should offer a sounds package and to be honest maybe have it installed and configured by default with the ability to easily disable it.

As long as they are few, and tiny (same with possible background images), I have no problem with them being included by default. But… If they take more than, say, a couple of MiB… better keep that stuff out, IMO.

Not sure that is still valid but last time I tried there was a problem with the mixer.
So, if you try and notice the same thing, feel free to add a comment or vote for the relative ticket.

Oh, I didn’t know that. Why did we have a sound competition then, if the sounds don´t actually work?

What’s the purpose of that, since the sounds won’t actually work, except for one?

At least 2 sounds are working : startup sounds and error sound. For the others I don’t use them, so I don’t know

It was community initiated, same as the backgrounds competition. None of the results are shipped with beta releases yet. I suppose the hope was that someday everything needed got implemented and then we have everything ready to go. That “someday” was probably judged too optimistic in the excitement of it all… :slight_smile:

As I said, somewhat “ill fated”, but hardly something to get upset about…