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 /---------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Internet: chow@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (128.84.248.35 or 128.84.253.35) | | Usenet: ...{uw-beaver|decvax|vax135}!cornell!batcomputer!chow | | Bitnet: chow@crnlthry.bitnet | | Phone: 1-607-272-8014 Address: 107 Catherine St, Ithaca NY 14850 | | Delphi: chow2 PAN: chow | \---------------------------------------------------------------------------/