XBell does't go through the sound card as it should be under pulseaudio

[Vytas]

I am unable to configure system bell to go via pulseaudio, although that worked for me in Gutsy.
Instead of emitting ugly pc speaker sound, I would like to get some sample played by audio card.

Configuration utilities such as papref do not help here, so I have tried editing config files. I uncommented load-module module-x11-bell sample=x11-bell in /etc/pulse/default.pa, but that doesn't help, I still hear pc speaker beep. Moreover, after this change I even cannot disable system bell in the sound preferences.

Shouldn't "nice" bell be configured by default, and why cannot I configure it neither by GUI nor by hand?

[Vytas (vytas)]

OK, sorry, I missed uncommenting
load-sample-lazy x11-bell /usr/share/sounds/gtk-events/activate.wav

So now I am able to configure it manually but nevertheless it is a bug that it is off by default without a GUI utility to configure. It is actually quite a nice feature! :)

[Cristian Klein (cristiklein)]

I agree. XBell is very useful in a few cases (for example I love using „ping -a” when my Internet dies).

However, I don't feel this should be default, because way to many applications are abusing it (i.e. bash_completion) and the end-user will quickly get annoyed. For setting it on a per-user level, I recommend the attached „.xsession” file.

[Cristian Klein (cristiklein)]

I forgot to mention, $HOME/.local/share/beep.wav is user-generated WAVE file with the beep sample. It could be generated, for example, using the command:

oggdec /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/dialog-warning.ogg -o $HOME/.local/share/sounds/beep.wav

[Vytas (vytas)]

Basically looking at GNOME sound properties dialog and Lennart comments I can see that this functionality should be automatically enabled when user selects "Play alert sound" from "Sounds" tab in gnome-sound-properties. However, if I select this I get the PC-speaker beep instead (on both Jaunty beta and Intrepid up-to-date). Maybe this is somehow related to the notorious bug 331589 ?

Moreover, I am not sure which package is misbehaving that we don't hear this alert at all. Metacity? libcanberra?

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

See report #486154 for lots of information on the no-beep issue.

Merge?

[Vytas (vytas)]

It was somehow fixed in the recent releases, at least for me