Battle of the system sounds

[greatbear]

Among other things I have done today upon returning home from Jeff's place is to put the new PC through it's paces doing some audio editing. Compared to the machines I had prior, this one is like buttah. Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro), my preferred audio editor, does not hesitate even when running an involved filter on a pretty huge file. Sweetness.

But there is another reason for this geekery.

At work were are blessed < /sarcasm> with IBM ThinkCentre running either Windows 2000 or XP. That's not necessarily awful, and the machines themselves are decent, solid, mainstream business boxes. No, the big problem for me is the default system event sounds. Specifically, those sounds being played at full volume through the built-in speaker in the computer chassis. One of my coworkers insists on cranking the volume up to max so he hears every system event and prompt. It's bad enough that the automated test software we use is quite 'musical' in that respect, but he falls into phases where he generates lots of errors and prompts. Factor in his full-tilt cellphone that he takes forever to answer and my typical day is the hum of a hundred fans punctuated with this:

BOOONK! DINNG! BOOONK BOOONK! DINNG! ... DINNG! BOOONK! DINNGDINNGDINNG! RINGRING! RINGRING! RINGRING! BOOONK! DINNGBOOONK! DINNG! ad nauseum.

I know now what living inside a pinball machine must be like. Note that this does NOT include the black guy with Tourettes who must go off his medicine on Fridays and sounds like Bobby McFerrin, The Platters, the Pips, the Stylistics, James Brown (RIP), Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison piled together in a ball in a twisted version of Katamari Damacy.

He does not turn down the sound, citing his need to hear the prompts come up, never mind the fact that the prompts themselves are big screens of graphics or angry red dialog boxes. His noises often cause me to check out my screen for problems. I could crank up Delicious Agony or WOXY.com or KNAC.com or my iPod to drown out the racket, but that is kinda frowned upon. Besides, there is still that matter of similar prompt sounds. Since some of my favorites got lost in hard drive crashes a while back, I figured I should make up some of my own. Licks and tricks from Vai, Satriani, Rush, etc. Complete 'themes' this time. Nothing like having Opeth telling me that I have mail, or Geddy Lee barking that some process has taken a dump. No one else has that going on there. Yep, Anarchy In The Test Console, I say.

Comments

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't a tiny 4 Ω or 8 Ω resistor across his speaker's terminals fix things up?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

At times ripping the cone out of it feels like a better idea. I have gone over to his PC and turned down the sound, but not long after it's back up again. He will sometimes turn it down when he gets some noisy email with a video in it, but up it goes when the chimes start again.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the soldering can make the speaker wire kind of brittle. *wink*

Particularly sneaky would be moving one of the wires to an unused pin on the header connector

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Seconded on the Audition lovin'. It seems that Syntrillium people still have their hands in it, and Adobe just bought it to add to their ever growing arsenal of acquisitions to total internet dominance. I was pissed when I first heard of it, and downloaded a free upgrade from CE 2 to Audition 1.0 a while back. Not much difference there. I'm using 1.5 now.

I gotta try my hand at the sequencing of samples one of these days. I messed around with some example files, and 'messed' is what I ended up with.

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

I do all my stings/jingles and podcasts on it - it's possible. A lot of glitch artists use it.

It's not Acid for mashups I know but it's very cool for non-musical collagy stuff.

[mhkrabat.livejournal.com]

What a knob.

I hate all the event noises that computers make though at one point where I once worked, we had the ability to create our own noises. This was both hugely fun and risky as we were bloody irreverent and in an area where our public could hear the noises. My favorite and the one for the most embarassment was the one that exclaimed "Don't bump me, I'll spray!!" when the mouse was moved or jarred after the system went into sleep mode.

Perhaps you could covertly change the noises on your cow orker's machine? Downside is that you'll need to act as surprised as he'll be.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I could so see using Stephanie Miller's "Lying Sack of Crap" jingle somewhere in there... ;)

[sfmini.livejournal.com]

Too bad you can't log in remotely and delete all his wav files.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Or fiddle the Group Policy in the Active Directory (assuming they use that) to set all system sounds to null. ;)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I'm unfortunately locked out of anything like that, as is everyone else. The place is quite rightly verrry picky about security. Still, I have my own workarounds.:)

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Well, it was a thought. I don't suppose there's any sympathetic souls in IT who would have the necessary admin access? I mean, theoretically this could be characterized as a productivity issue.... ;)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Can't do it, the capability isnt there and several of the system directories are made read-only by the IT nazis, and me with no admin rights. It's very frustrating, since we got to get people in to install specialized software that they do not run into except in our section, and they know not what to do a lot of time. I gotta coach them on occasions.

I have had temprary admin capabilities given to me by them, and while I had them I reworked my PC to be a bit looser. Unfortunately, the lease on that perfectly good PC was up and I got an 'upgrade' which has been a nightmare since. 'Tis okay, I'd rather bitch and make those responsible look like the total tools they are.

[sfmini.livejournal.com]

Compressed foam ear plugs. When I worked in cubeland I loved them. I could hear the phone and a person talking directly at me, but the rest of the world was silent. Don't know what else to suggest....

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Machete? Napalm? Backpack nuke? lol

I sometimes resort to plugging my earbuds into my ears and using the ipod, other times I go and work in my other space if I have things to do there.