People of the Free World [1]!

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/free-sound-themes.html

GNOME 2.24 supports XDG
sound themes. Unfortunately however right now there is only a single sound
theme in existence: the sound-theme-freedesktop
— which is pretty basic.

Help us change this! There are many web sites like art.gnome.org which provide a large selection
of graphical themes for Gtk+, Metacity, icon sets and so on. We want to see a similarly large selection of sound themes available! And we’d like you to contribute to this!

How do you prepare sound themes? Read the XDG Sound Theming
and the XDG Sound
Naming specifications. Start with basing your work on the aforementioned sound-theme-freedesktop.
And then just go ahead!

Please note that only subset of the sounds listed in the Sound Naming
Specification is currently hooked up properly — i.e. generated when “input
feedback” is enabled or triggered by applications. Nonetheless it makes sense
to include them in your theme, because eventually they will be hooked up.

Trending
[$] The race to replace Redis

When you put a theme together, make sure that you only select sounds that
have a sensible Free Software license — or if you have produced them yourself
you pick a good license yourself. GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, CC-BY-SA 3.0 and CC-BY 3.0
are good choices.

Not everyone is as lucky as Richard Hughes and has a mom who is
practically an endless source of special effect sounds. If your mom sucks then
don’t despair! The OLPC team has compiled a huge set of Free sounds
that is waiting to be made an XDG sound theme. I am eagerly looking forward to your sound
themes that make use of “The Berklee Sampling
Archive – Volume 13 – synthesizer – fx (126 samples) spaceships, lasers,
explosions, machineguns, glisses” to start a war in space each time you
click a button on your screen![1]

Footnotes

[1] Free as in free desktops that is.

[2] OK, to be honest I am not actually that eagerly looking forward to that. Spacewar-at-your-fingertips is pretty lame in comparison to a theme called “Richard’s Mom”[3].

[3] You have no idea what all those Hughsie’s-Mom-jokes are about? Then listen to the sound files that are shipped with gnome-power-manager!