Another Hoary Chestnut

November 3, 2003 5:19 am General

I started to briefly look at sound in the GNOME Desktop. It’s nice to see that good progress seems to be made with GStreamer, but we’re still kind of sucking at a desktop level. Sure, we have some nice apps with Rhythmbox, Jamboree, Totem and others but some of the more simple tasks that user might do involves the current sound capplet. The user interface is pretty dreadful, and although we have a ‘Sound Events’ tab in, gnome-audio isn’t even part of the desktop release.

I took a few screenshots of XP and OSX for comparison purposes. I think it’s pretty easy to see which one is more favourable. A simple set of tasks might be something like

  • Toggle sound on/off/mute
  • Adjust the sound volume
  • Adjust the balances/channels
  • Test sound
  • Enable sound for alert events
  • Choose a sound to be played for an alert event

I’m not convinced that we need sound themes, especially given the few sound files we current have for the desktop. Hopefully we’ll be finally able to re-use the work that Ronald, Ted, Christian & Co. have been doing on the current mixer and get some of this work rolled into gnome-control-center. Would be also nice to sit down and figure out the API to replace the libgnome stuff.

Well, I can hope. Meanwhile, Jonathan pointed me to the AT&T Natural Voices text-to-speech engine. Audrey saying ‘Welcome to the G’NOME Desktop’ sounds very well.

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