AppEvents

AppEvents

Windows associates sounds with certain events. The most notable are the sounds you hear when you log on to or off of the operating system. You assign sounds to different events—including minimizing windows, opening menus, and so on—in the Sounds And Audio Devices Properties dialog box shown in Figure C-1. To open this dialog box, in Control Panel click Sounds And Audio Devices. Figure C-1 shows which subkeys of AppEvents provide this dialog box's values. Many applications also associate sounds with certain events. For example, you can download and install sounds for use with Microsoft Office 2003 Editions. These sounds provide great feedback that I've missed when they're not available. If you don't like the sound that a particular event produces, you can change the sound file associated with it. For example, you can create your own recording that says “You've got spam!” and associate that sound file with Windows Messenger's New Mail event.

Figure C-1 Associate sounds with events using the Sounds And Audio Devices Properties dialog box.

These events and the sounds associated with them are in HKCU\AppEvents. There are two subkeys in AppEvents. The first is EventLabels, which contains one subkey for each event, and the subkey's default value is the name of the event as you see it in Control Panel. The second is Schemes. This is the more interesting subkey because it actually associates sound files with each event. You can customize AppEvents, but doing so isn't worth the extra effort. Configuring sounds is far easier through Control Panel. My suggestion is that you configure your sounds the way you like them, and then export AppEvents to a REG file that you can use to configure sounds down the line. Just make sure the sound files are available if you're using the REG file on a different computer. Most times, you'll find all these sound files in %SystemRoot%\media.

NOTE
Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 add a small number of new events to the AppEvents key. For example, the new security features of Internet Explorer have sound events for blocked popup windows, automatic file downloads, and so on.