Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!chow
From: chow@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: soundmaste vs. Apple Sndmanager
Message-ID: <5414@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 7 Jul 88 19:17:40 GMT
References: <3775@saturn.ucsc.edu> <603@kinetics.UUCP> <3949@ut-emx.UUCP>
Reply-To: chow@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow)
Distribution: na
Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 47

In article <3949@ut-emx.UUCP> jcc@ut-emx.UUCP (J. Chris Cooley) writes:
|In article <603@kinetics.UUCP|, buzz@kinetics.UUCP (Mahboud Zabetian) writes:
|| 
|| Why did Apple decide to go with Synchronous sounds instead of Asynchronous
|| sounds?
|
|[I'm not religious, but:]  AMEN!  This is the first thing I noticed after
|installing Sys Rel 6.0 on the SE.  Gone (for now...?) are the days of
|making my voice "beeps" "rap."  |sniff!<
| 

I too, would like to encourage Apple to change the sysbeep to be async
instead of its present sync mode.  What's the use of sampling all these
wonderful beep sounds if the sysbeep takes forever and locks up the machine
during the beeps.

Last summer I had a chance to talk to someone at Apple, and he remarked that
the snd beep sound (then only on the Mac II) was made synch so that the user
wouldn't get confused with beep sounds getting out of synch with alert
boxes, etc.

I would like to suggest that this line of thinking is plain wrong!  Consider
that the sysbeep offered by the Sound Manager has a fixed duration - the
length of the sample.  Before the Sound Manager, the sysbeep call allowed
one to choose the length of the beep.  Most application developers decided
to use very short beeps, and therefore had them repeated.  Today, (or since
last March if you've got a Mac II), many beep sounds are long, and listening
to a series of two or three beeps is anoying if they each must be completed
before the next one starts.  Not to mention this take alot of _time_.

In the worse possible case, consider the plight of someone using a terminal
emulator on noisy phone lines.  If your host sends out BEL signals when it
receives nonsense, and if your beepsound isn't trivially short, then you can
be stuck with alot of beeps which must be completed before you can do
anything else, and which might take a long time.

I believe that the "rapping" model which Cheapbeep exhibits, combined with
asynch operation is the correct way for the beep sounds to operate.  What do
you think?

Christopher Chow
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