unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jim Rorie <jfrorie@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 12:49 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> On 15/04/10 21:20, Jim Rorie wrote:
> It's a cool idea, but I don't think it meets the cost-benefit
> requirement. There are better ways to signal battery low (including
> sound events for folks who are more in tune with that) than reshaping
> ALL sounds.

I'm not married to the idea, but it thought it showed a good example of
modal audio communication.

> A major problem we have with sound events, classically, is latency. You
> click, and half a second later the bell goes. That makes the sound theme
> feel arbitrary and cheap. Let's work out how to make it feel real and
> immediate, which means cutting latency out, not putting more in.

I'm curious what your meaning of latency in this context is?  Is this
scheduling of the sounds through pulse audio?  Is it the perceived delay
in the audio transformation?  Are you opposed to the application of any
type of audio transformation?

I'm trying to get an idea of the parameters of discussion so we know
what boundaries we have.

> Sound is certainly an area where less will be more :-)

Agreed.  Any thing of this nature should be real subtle, lest it annoy
the user.