[PlanetCCRMA] Dummy Soundcard for obnoxious applications (was Re: [PlanetCCRMA] multi card fc2)

[Janina Sajka]

Well, well. What can I say? One person's "obnoxious" is another person's
"critical accessibility feature." This most definitely includes the
system beep (at whatever Herz). As a matter of fact, over here in the
alternative interfaces camp, we call beeps and bleeps that are
associated to system events "Earcons" or "SonIcons."

I don't know that Mozilla developers used any such nobel design
criteria. I would certainly not wager on it. But, the ability to
associate particular sounds with system events is absolutely vital to
many "eyes-free" interface users.

Of course, I'm for your ability to turn them off, just as I'm for my
ability to turn them on. We DO need a common approach to audio
management that can be honored across all desktop and console
applications.

For the system (Ctrl-G) beep, if you're on a 2.6 kernel, do:

rmmod pcspkr

Or try this workaround:

setterm -bfreq 1

PS: I happen to like my system beep at "-bfreq 55" -- but you could also
do "-bfreq 440" and just tune to it.

jim branagan writes:
> Steve Harris wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 05:40:29AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>[QUESTION] Can anyone tell me why Mozilla should be able to change the
> >>clock frequency of the sound card anyway???? [/QUESTION]
> >>   
> >>
> >Heh, for the same reason JACK can.
> >
> >To get round this problem I stuck a $10 soundcard next to my hammerfall
> >and made that card0, which is opened by mozilla and friends.
> >
> >- Steve
> > 
> >
> After trying for months to turn off all the gratuitous noises generated 
> by hundreds of applications which had no need to make noise, other than 
> someone thought it might be cute, I resorted to this same approach.
> 
> Most of KDE was easy to shut off, but for some apps, - like bash, and 
> that obnoxious beep it likes to generate when I hit one extra backspace 
> at the beginning of a line -  this seems to be the only way to shut them 
> up.  I've been through the bash man page and manual from beginning to 
> end, and there is no mention of sound at all.  That beep sounds REALLY 
> bad at 8000 watts (we use this PC to play music between bands at a music 
> club, and as a recording platform).  Wasting one low-grade sound card 
> (in this case the built-in motherboard sound) was by far the easiest 
> solution, and involves a lot less eye-strain.
> 
> I wouldn't want to waste a precious PCI slot for this, but there are 
> plenty of cheap USB sound 'cards' which can be put in slot 0, to 
> eliminate 'unauthorized' sounds and sound card tweaking.
> 
> e. james branagan
> the MUSE § Nashville, TN
> 
> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka				Phone: +1.202.494.7040
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://www.CapitalAccessibility.Com

Chair, Accessibility Workgroup		Free Standards Group (FSG)
janina@freestandards.org		http://a11y.org

If Linux can't solve your computing problem, you need a different problem.