Alert Sound files are missing in Linux Mint 15

[Gumwise Samgee]

Steps to reproduce:
- Do a fresh install of Linux Mint 15 "olivia", Cinnamon 32-bit edition.
- Go to System Settings => Sound => Sound Effects
- "Alert volume" cannot be turned on.

My own troubleshooting:
All other sound was working fine. I just wanted the alert "beeps" available so I forced it on with the command:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds true

Now the "Alert volume" is available and I can select the "Default" alert sound. Unfortunately I can't select "Bark", "Drip", "Glass", or "Sonar." A check of the file system reveals that Linux Mint 15 is missing the Gnome alert sound files (bark.ogg, drip.ogg, glass.ogg, sonar.ogg)!

[Adrian Larsson (adrianklarsson)]

Changed the topic for you.

I do not have the problem with the first part of the bug, where you can't turn it on, so that is probably a setting problem at your side.

I am however able to reproduce the second part of the bug, and it seems indead like Mint is missing .ogg-files.
I confirmed this.

[Gumwise Samgee (gumwise-samgee)]

I did a re-install and was able to turn on the alert sounds this time, so that part of my issue was probably a one time thing, most likely some "user error" ;-).

Sound files were still missing, though.

Thanks for you attention on this matter!

[Gerd (gerd-s)]

I also had both problems after a fresh install of Mint 15 64 Bit, no login- and alert sounds.
The proposed command "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds true" finally fixed it but also no sounds except for the default sound is selectable.

So both problems are not a user-fault but generally faulty, mayb dependent on hardware configuration.

[Dusan Susic (dusan-susic)]

I have these problems, too...

[Clement Lefebvre (clementlefebvre)]

Hi there,

A few issues were mentioned so I'll address them below:

- The login sounds which were traditionally in Mint were disabled in Mint 15 for performance and stability reasons (basically they were played without pulseaudio and we were afraid they would prevent pulse audio to acquire access to the sound card device during the session startup). You can re-enabled them in mdmsetup (Menu->Login Window).

- The main switch for event sounds is functional.

- The selection of custom sounds among a predefined list is something we never wanted to see land in Linux Mint. It was inherited from GNOME 3 in gnome-control-center and also in cinnamon-control-center all the way to Cinnamon 1.8. Event sounds on tab completion and in the terminal, in particular, were something we wanted to disable. At the time of Mint 15 we didn't have good knowledge of this and there were no plans to reshape the sound module in cinnamon-settings, so the sound files were temporarily removed. In Cinnamon 2.0 this feature is permanently removed (i.e. you cannot select sounds anymore and cinnamon-control-center doesn't provide any). We're considering adding sound events selection in Cinnamon 2.2 (Mint 17), but we want to stick to http://cgit.freedesktop.org/sound-theme-freedesktop/, either via a sound-theme selection (as was the case in an earlier version of GNOME), or by letting the user define not one custom sound, but an entire selection on predefined events.