My BBC Master - - - getting Beeped-off.

[Bill Marriott]

SparkOut,

> One drawback in particular is that with the internal sound set, then the
> beep will sound even if the user's sound settings are set to mute. That 
> can
> be a very unwanted effect.

Or the exact wanted effect.

The issue is that beep is just a beep and was not intended to be a 
magnificent multimedia playback thing, or even an end-user-friendly feature.

In the pre-2.9 days, beep always sounded the internal buzzer on Windows 
boxes. The buzzer had some idiosyncratic capabilities, that didn't even work 
on all systems, to vary the pitch and duration of its little tweets. It 
didn't go through the system's sound manager, so you're correct that muting 
had no effect. Indeed it didn't even use a sound card, which was a very good 
thing if you were writing a utility for a headless server that didn't have 
one. You could have different tones for various events, and didn't have to 
install drivers or hook up speakers for these.

Over the years, the internal PC buzzer disappeared from some systems (and 
indeed was sometimes emulated via poorly-written drivers). In Rev 2.9, it 
was requested that beep simply sound the system's usual alert tone as 
specified through the operating system's control panel. And it was made to 
do so -- with the addition of the beepSound property to satisfy people (like 
me) who still wanted the ability to address the internal buzzer on Windows 
for a variety of reasons. So now you have beepPitch and beepDuration being 
more esoteric than ever, and it appears the changes had the side effect of 
screwing up the Linux beep, if it ever worked at all (I did not test 2.6.1 
on Linux).

> I'd love to futher a civil and non-political call for better audio support
> in Rev, and in my view something that needs to have no dependence on
> QuickTime.

Sure. I just wanted to address a very specific technical question. This has 
nothing to do with QuickTime. It's just about calling the standard system 
alert.