Mandriva Appeals to Users for Bookend Audio Bits

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.

Comments

As a long-time Mandriva user...

[Leomania]

... 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

[tkg]

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.

Agreed; Silence is Golden.

[Kadin2048]

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.