The positions of sounds

Glass smash with liquidGNOME bug 616743 includes a patch which, if you have stereo speakers, will make the system bell move horizontally depending on which window it happened in. For example, if you’re editing a file in a terminal on the left of the screen, and the terminal bleeps, the sound will come from the left. If your mutt terminal is on the right of the screen, you will hear a bleep on the right when you receive new mail.

Sounds other than the system bell won’t be affected by this change. For example, music played by a music player will not be affected by the position of the window.

(The patch also appears to set the vertical position of the system bell according to the y-coordinate of the window.  Your chronicler is having difficulty imagining the sound system where this would be distinguishable, but perhaps is not experienced enough in these matters.)

We are rarely minded to accept enhancement patches, since every new line of code is a line of code we have to maintain for ever.  However, this one isn’t complicated, and appears to have a positively useful result.

What are your thoughts on the matter, gentle reader?

Photo © whisperwolf, cc-by-nc.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.