9.23. Speech

9.22. Sound

Using the panes of the Sound panel, you can configure the sound system of your Mac in any of several ways.

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Tip: Here's a quick way to jump directly to the Sound panel of System Preferences ”from the keyboard, without ever having to open System Preferences or click Sound. Just press Option as you tap one of the volume-adjustment keys on the top row of your Apple keyboard.

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9.22.1. Sound Effects Tab

"Sound effects" means error beeps ”the sound you hear when the Mac wants your attention, or when you click someplace you shouldn't.

Just click the sound of your choice to make it your default system beep. Most of the canned choices here are funny and clever, yet subdued enough to be of practical value as alert sounds (see Figure 9-14).

Figure 9-14. You can adjust your overall speaker volume independently from the alert-beep volume, thank goodness. Tip nerds should note that you can also adjust the alert volume by holding down the Option key as you drag the handle in the speaker-volume menulet (on your menu bar).

As for the other controls on the Sound Effects panel, they include:

• Alert volume slider . Some Mac fans are confused by the fact that even when they drag this slider all the way to the left, the sound from games and music CDs still plays at full volume.

  The actual main volume slider for your Mac is the "Output volume" slider at the bottom of the Sound pane. The "Alert volume" slider is just for error beeps; Apple was kind enough to let you adjust the volume of these error beeps independently.

• Play user interface sound effects . This option produces a few subtle sound effects during certain Finder operations: when you drag something off of the Dock, into the Trash, or onto a folder, or when the Finder finishes a file-copying job. (There are a few more of these in Tiger than in previous versions.)

• Play feedback when volume is changed . Most Mac keyboards have little volume-adjustment keys on the top row that, when pressed, adjust the overall speaker level. Each time you press one of these keys, the Mac beeps to help you gauge the current volume.

  That's all fine when you're working at home. But more than one person has been humiliated in an important meeting when the Mac made a sudden, inappropriately loud sonic outburst ”and then amplified that embarrassment by furiously and repeatedly pressing the volume-down key, beeping all the way.

  If you turn off this checkbox, the Mac won't make any sound at all as you adjust its volume. Instead, you'll see only a visual representation of the steadily decreasing (or increasing) volume level.

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Tip: If you like the little volume-adjustment clicks most of the time, you can shut them up on a one-shot basis by pressing Shift as you tap the volume keys.

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9.22.2. Output Tab

"Output" means speakers or headphones. For 99 percent of the Mac-using community, this pane offers nothing useful except the Balance slider, with which you can set the balance between your Mac's left and right stereo speakers. The "Choose a device" wording seems to imply that you can choose which speakers you want to use for playback. But Internal is generally the only choice, even if you have external speakers. (The Mac uses your external speakers automatically when they're plugged in.)

A visit to this pane is necessary, however, if you want to use a Bluetooth or USB phone headset. Choose its name from the list. Repeat on the Input tab.

9.22.3. Input Tab

This panel lets you specify which sound source you want the Mac to "listen to," if you have more than one connected: external microphone, internal microphone, line input, or whatever. It also lets you adjust the sensitivity of that microphone ”its input volume ”by dragging the slider and watching the real-time Input level meter above it change as you speak.

Put another way, it's a quick way to see if your microphone is working.