Setting System Sounds

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A friend of mine once said, “What fun is a painting if you can’t hear the music?” He was obviously talking about something else, and no doubt acting a bit pretentious, but his words apply to this business of customization as well. If you’re going to gussy up your system so as to make it scream out at you visually, why not make it do so audibly too?

I won’t insist that you do anything here, because not everyone is keen on system sounds, but you should at least know that you can set up your system to play sounds for various system events. In the default system setup, sound events are inactive, so if you want sounds, you will have to enable them and set up these events yourself. This is, fortunately, quite easily done.

To enable system sounds, go to your Main menu and select Preferences > Sound. Once you’ve done this, the Sound Preferences window will appear in all its simplicity: two tabs, two checkboxes, two buttons. To enable system sounds, you should first click the two checkboxes in the General tab: Enable sound server startup and Sounds for events. You must select both of them.

After that, click the Sound Events tab, which will provide you with a listing of events and preconfigured sounds for said events (see Figure 5-16 on the next page). You can preview any sound in the list by selecting the event or sound and then clicking the Play button.

Figure 5-16: Setting sounds to play for different events in GNOME

The list of events and sounds is for the GNOME Environment and several GNOME games, and you will notice that several events have no sound associated with them. By using the Browse button, you can add sounds from any appropriate (in genre and length) sound files that you might have or might download in the future.

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