On Sun, Feb 18, 2001 at 10:55:07AM -0500, Marc Girard wrote:

Hi Marc, Chris and Xavier and everyone else interested in creating sounds,

I'm very happy to see your help; most of the comments on dot.kde.org were 
unfortunately discussing all sorts of things, not related to creating sounds at 
all :}

> Today, reading dot.kde.org, my chance arrived.  You guys are in need of
> quality sound effects for KDE.  I'm a pro sound designer/sound engineer.  
> I have my little production studio and have access to various recording
> equipement.  I already designed sound effects and music for various video
> games.

Perfect!
 
> What are the guide lines?  Any themes in particular?  Let me know...

Currently, we have one default set of sounds that was created as a sound theme 
(i.e. the sounds sort of fit together). The theme is not complete tho. Have a 
look at Settings -> Look'n'Feel -> System Notifications. There are many more 
events than we have sounds.
  Additionally, there has been added a small collection of generic sounds 
(KDE_Beep_*.wav in $KDEDIR/share/sounds), but IMHO we could have better ones.

Most of the games don't even have sound support because there are no sounds they 
could use. We have the "kde-artists"-team, which paints nice icons and graphics 
that other applications can use. So, similar to the large pool of icons, we need 
a pool of generic sounds/effects. E.g. the card games could use some card 
sounds, the action games could use explosions, scattering sounds, etc., tetris 
could have some sound when you rotate an item and when it's arrives at the 
bottom, ... Some "Game starts", "Game finished", "New Highscore", "You Lost", 
etc. sounds would be nice as well. Have a look at the games and imagine what 
sounds would fit, for example.

All sorts of different beeps and bleeps will also help apps that have some sort 
of notification, e.g. dialup programs, ICQ, IRC programs, "You have mail", "Your 
download has finished", ... We need many of those so you can assign different 
sounds to those different events. Often it should even suffice to have the same 
"bleep" in a different pitch, other effects applied etc.

For "GUI" effects, we would also need some complementary sounds, like 
maximize/minimize, opening a popupmenu/closing it, for increasing/decreasing 
various things.

To put them all into themes would require a complete list of needed sounds, which 
we don't have at the moment. Maybe we could start by creating the pool of sounds 
and group them into themes a little bit later, when we have a more concrete list?

Regarding the fileformat, I think 16bit wav, 22kHz, mono would be the minimum to 
make it sound ok. For better effects, stereo and maybe even 44kHz would be 
possible, but generally, the files should be as small as possible.

> I'm looking forward to this. :)

Yes, me too :)

I'm willing to coordinate this. Do you know CVS? That's the system where all of 
KDE's sourcecode, images, documentation, etc. is stored and managed. With CVS, 
every developer has read/write access to all the files. I can either collect the
sounds via mail/ftp and put them into CVS, into a "kde-media" module, or you get 
a CVS account and put them there yourself. Just tell me what you prefer.

This mailinglist was originally intended for development of  
multimedia-applications in KDE, but traffic is not very high, so I think we can 
share this list for now (just so that you don't wonder :). Otherwise, we could 
set up a new list without a problem. 

Do we need a webpage? Anything I forgot?

Cheers,
Carsten Pfeiffer
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