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Mandriva Appeals to Users for Bookend Audio Bits 42

Posted by timothy from the more-klaxons-are-all-they-need dept.
Mandriva announced it is holding a contest for the best startup and logoff music for Mandriva 2007. The winner gets to have their sound as part of the new release. Technical lead Romain D'Alverny told Newsforge some of the philosophy behind the contest.
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Mandriva Appeals to Users for Bookend Audio Bits More

Mandriva Appeals to Users for Bookend Audio Bits

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  • nothing to hear here... (Score:3, Funny)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @10:23AM (#15568976)
    please move along...;)

  • A 100% hit! (Score:3, Funny)

    by nitio ( 825314 ) <paulo@ruthes.gmail@com> on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @10:25AM (#15568999) Homepage
    C:\WINDOWS\Sounds\Startup.wav
    • This file path is Copyright (c) 1995 Microsoft Corporation, All Rights Reserved. Posting said file path on the internet without prior permission from Microsoft Corporation or its officers is a violation of your End User License Agreement and will be considered breach of contract. You will be hearing from our lawyers and hired goons shortly.

      With Love and Chairs,
      Steve Ballmer
  • I don't see why they don't just throw 10 or 15 million bucks at Brian Eno to create some nice sounds for them...

  • The point being? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dubmun ( 891874 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @10:27AM (#15569028) Homepage Journal
    People who may be interested in such a contest may not even be Linux users.
    I think that most of the entries will come from people with at least SOME experience with Linux. It seems to me that most people who are interested in contributing to Linux distros are USING one. Correct me if I'm wrong.

    That said, I'm interested to see what they come up with.

  • As a long-time Mandriva user... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Leomania ( 137289 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @10:39AM (#15569130) Homepage
    ... I just want to know if they're going to finally fix the cutting off of the shutdown sound. As either Gnome or KDE exits, it seems no effort was made to be sure the sound had finished playing before turning off the sound service. Somehow that was never an issue in Knoppix, which always managed to finish that longish "Initiating shutdown sequence" clip during KDE shutdown.

    Such a minor thing, but so noticeable.

  • No Prize (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tkg ( 455770 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @10:48AM (#15569209)
    FTFA:
    "There will be no cash or any other kind of prize for the winners, except for a hearty thanks from Mandriva..."

    Why not at least offer a lifetime Gold club membership for the winner and a Tee shirt or something for the runners up. A "hearty thanks", for someone's creative work, even if it is only a couple of 5 second clips, seems almost insulting.
  • I have always found these sounds stupid and boring on the long run.

    • Agreed; Silence is Golden. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) <slashdot.kadin@xox y . net> on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @02:39PM (#15571180) Homepage Journal
      I'm with you there. I don't know why a computer needs a shut-down sound; it always struck me as a stupid Windows thing, something they tossed in there to amuse people while they were watching the "Windows is shutting down" screen.

      When I tell my computer to shut down, the only thing I want to hear is the fans going quiet, and I want to hear that as quickly as possible.

      I'm a little more open to the idea of startup sound effects, but only if they serve some sort of purpose. The Mac always gave its startup chime as part of its self-test routine, as a confirmation that the hardware was good. So if you got the chime and then the system refused to boot, you knew it was a software issue and not hardware. Even if your video card was bad or blown, or you didn't have a monitor plugged in. (Which is incidentally handy if you're ever buying a used system at a trade show or something.) There are some HP workstations which will even play a diagnostic tone on startup if they've gone bad, which you can play into a telephone to a tech support rep, and they will decode to tell you what's FUBARed.

      I might even be convinced that playing a sound once the OS's GUI is started and it's ready for user input is useful, since it's a good way to tell the user "okay, I'm here, ready to go!", but this necessitates making sure that playing the sound is the ABSOLUTE LAST thing that happens in the startup sequence. If that's the purpose of the sound, I don't want to walk over to the computer upon hearing it, and still have it churning away on some part of the boot sequence, or loading the GUI.

      I think the Mandriva people, as well as anyone else involved in designing an OS, should sit down and think about what purpose exactly these sounds serve, and make sure they're doing their jobs, before they invest a lot of time -- either their own or somebody else's -- in making it pretty. If they're serving a legitimate function, by all means then make them pretty and polished. But I'd rather lose the excess noise if they're not functional.

      • If you have a startup sound then you are far less likely to suddenly be blasted out of it by some random noises your computer is inspired to make. That startup sound both tells you that your soundcard and speakers are working as well as reminding you what volume you have left them at.

        As for a shutdown noise, as long as it is fed out to play away without interupting the speedy shutdown of your machine what does it matter? You could argue that here it also serves to remind you what volume you are leaving

      • My Asus motherboard (forget the model number right now..) will play sound clips from its internal audio if something goes terribly wrong during boot time. It will tell you which piece of hardware it thinks is faulty.

        The best thing is that you can upload your own sounds into the BIOS to give those error messages extra meaning.

  • Whats up with the Gnome logon/out sounds? (Score:3)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @10:56AM (#15569273) Journal
    They sound like my first attempts at making sound with my Commodore 64 when I was 8.

  • I'm gonna win... (Score:5, Funny)

    by goodEvans ( 112958 ) <[devans] [at] [airatlanta.ie]> on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @11:07AM (#15569374) Homepage
    Father Jack style!

    Login: Arse! Drink! Girls! Feck!
    Shutdown: Feck off!

  • Progressive rock (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @11:19AM (#15569502) Homepage Journal
    My vote would be for excerpts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Overdriv e [wikipedia.org] :)

  • Thats great (Score:5, Funny)

    by matt328 ( 916281 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @11:26AM (#15569552)
    now if I could only get my damn sound card to work in linux.
  • If you have to wait while the sounds are played, then the only answer can be "no sound".
  • too bad my daughter-board is fried, including my sound card.
  • The only time I shut down my computer is when the UPS runs out of juice.

    I find event sounds annoying. At least events that I know I initiated. I'd rather have audio notifications of events I wouldn't otherwise be aware of. Like mod points or something
  • How do I get the startup volume to be a little (LOT) quieter. I don't want to have to adjust the volume on my amp constantly, so I have it set rather high (to where it sounds best) and adjust the volume with the apps (kmix or whatever). However, whenever KDE starts up, it blasts that noise so loud it clips the amp massively. How do I change that?
  • I don't get it, why don't they include, say the top 10 sounds, and let us users choose the one we like?

    Free Life
    Boaz
    • They need one default startup/shutdown sound for their default theme, the one we got after installation.
      Or they keep spare prices for some background contest.

      Anyway, packaging the 10 best sounds of the contest in Mandriva 2007 is a good idea we should suggest.

    • TFA says they are going to publish all entries. I presume you can use any sound file you like, it's just that the winner will be used as the default.

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