[ubuntu-art] On sound themes (and sound-theme-freedesktop)

[Dylan McCall]

Curious why Fedora manages to actually make some useful system sounds
while Ubuntu continues to be oddly mute, I looked at the version number
for sound-theme-freedesktop. It is (*gasp*) now at 0.7 upstream, while
the one packaged in Ubuntu is 0.4. In fairness, it looks like 0.4 was
released on August 23, with 0.5 tailing it on August 26. It just so
happens that one tiny 3 day amendment alone would have made a huge
difference.

I grabbed the upstream version from git, installed it and was overjoyed
by my desktop now making useful sounds from time to time (instead of
just an obnoxious desktop-login noise). For example, the volume applet
makes a cute little pop now when I adjust the volume. (Although, oddly,
the keyboard-driven volume control via gnome-settings-daemon doesn't
make that sound even though it did in Fedora. I guess that's a patch
waiting for GNOME 2.30).

However, the Ubuntu sound theme, which remains the default, is thus far
very empty and doesn't inherit from the FreeDesktop one. I think this
could be improved in a huge way!

There are a lot of things which can be done here, and all the sounds
(even the Freedesktop ones which I like) could use a bit of touching up.
For example, many of them are just loud pops where something simpler and
more relevant could fit and the button sounds don't sound anything like
buttons. (Not that I use them anyway, but for those who wish to know
when they click buttons I am sure more pleasant sounds would be
appreciated). Oh, and I swear the instant messaging login and logout
sounds are reminiscent of MSN Messenger, although I may be mistaken as I
haven't used that in 5 years...

Basically, I haven't seen much interest in the sound effects thing in
Ubuntu, which is a shame because we now have a really good thing (the
Freedesktop sound themes spec) to make them happen. I'm not proposing a
desktop that doubles as a musical instrument, but this stuff allows
aural notifications to be way more helpful and possibly less obtrusive
as they produce less confusion for the end user.

Perhaps this would be a good thing to have in mind for Lucid, now that
the visual icons have been given so much love :)


Thanks,
Dylan