Echo Beach

Well, as promised here’s the wm5 sound theme I made for myself, now in full technicolor for all of you to enjoy.

Echo Beach

There’s a TXT file bundled with the sounds, to get people started but for quick reference’s sake here’s the core on how to add sound to wm5 devices:

Get all the sounds into your device’s windows folder
Exit the file browser and tap/click start > Settings followed by sounds and notifications, on the bottom of this new window
press notifications it’s straight forward from then on: choose the event from the drop box, check “play sound” if unchecked
and then choose one of eb_ files in the correct dropbox.

All files start with eb_ so they are easy to spot on the dropbox

Oh, if you can’t get the main ring tone (incomming call) sound going from the procedure above do the following:

Open WM’s file browser (the default one, not Total Commander or some 3d party app) and find the eb_ringtone.wav file, tap and hold to see the context menu and pick “use as ring tone”.

Hope you enjoy.

later edit: I’m already receiving emails about this so here’s the deal: don’t be surprised if I only get back to you next monday. I’m spending the weekend away from home and internet connections.

Oxygen – Quite a bit done today.

Right! Everything is at 48.000Hz!

Plus I got the some other sounds done and I’ve brushed up the jingle a bit more.

I’ll soon enough start filling in the wiki Joseph pointed out to me a few weeks back, as to the naming specification of the sound theme.

I compiled the list of sound on the current version of KDE and I noticed that the accessibility sounds are supposed to have….well…sounds. I find this rather strange. Shouldn’t we be using synthesized voices to warn about those events? Abstract sounds shouldn’t be used to warn users that are potentially impaired. it seem’s quite counter-productive to me. I’ll dig a bit further regarding this and who I should contact to make this happen.

Bottom line is: speech synthesis is something that should be working “out of the box” in every single distro or desktop environment, for the sake of actual accessibility.

KDE’s sound standards

Good to know one is not alone.

I had a nice chat with Joseph Gaffney regarding sound and multimedia on KDE. He developed the documention stating the standards and bare minimums for sound specs. Turns out I’ve been creating my sounds at 44.000Hz and the minimum for KDE is 48.000 so I’ll have to redo the mastering of everything I’ve done until now.

Talking to Joseph got me musing about 5.1 sounds and how they’d seriousy make KDE standout from the other desktop enviornments,  I have however no idea on how to even start forging that sound on by my humble self. But I will surely investigate.

KDE Sound Theme

I’ve been working on some sounds for KDE. The new upcomming version 4 is very promising in terms of user experience and since the system sounds never changed since “ever” I thought it was more then time for me to dive in.

I called the Sound Theme “Kinper” and you can find it in kde-look.org.

People are not too keen on commenting on KDE-LOOK, so feel free to add input. (I especially enjoy people who vote it as “bad” and don’t comment justifying it… honestly, what’s that vote for if you don’t care to share what you disliked?)

You can keep track on the sound theme’s development here.