Upconvert 'system-ready' startup sound to 5.1 surround

[Dustin Kirkland ]

The long-time 'system-ready' startup sound in Ubuntu is a nice stereo recording.

Modern sound formats, such as AC3, support 5.1 and even 7.1 surround sound. As Ubuntu finds itself the basis for more and more media/TV PCs, it would be *super* slick for Ubuntu to sport the OS industry's first (?) 5.1/7.1 channel startup sound. I think it would be very forward-looking and have a unique, high-fidelity appeal to our platform.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Pete: do you have the original source files used for the umbungo drums (I think this one was done at the same time?).

Now-a-days it's actually currently the "dialogue-question" sound:

  /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg -> dialog-question.ogg

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

AC3 is patent a encumbered format, so we may have to use a multi-channel WAV file instead.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Not that I fancy myself much of a sound producer, I did have some fun exercising the right side of my brain this weekend, culminating in a functional 5.1 remix of the Ubuntu login sound. A description of which is here:
 * http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2011/08/ubuntu-login-sound-in-51-channel-glory.html

I'm attaching a sample flac file here....

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Awesome work dude!
The only problem is that you used a lossy OGG as a base for your remix. Run "apt-get source ubuntu-sounds" (without sudo and the quotes) to download the uncompressed WAV sources.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Done!

I've remixed all three of:
 - desktop-login-5.1.wav
 - desktop-logout-5.1.wav
 - card_shuffle-5.1.wav
to 5.1 channels, starting from the original wav files.

I've pushed them to a branch at lp:~kirkland/ubuntu-sounds/834802, and request a peer review and merging.

I'm not sure if these should replace the original desktop-login.wav, desktop-logout.wav, and card_shuffle.wav sounds and just let the player downmix them to stereo, or if the 5.1 sound them should be separate. I'll leave that to the ubuntu-sounds packagers to decide.

I've exported these wavs to several formats (wav, ogg, ac3, flac), and as long as all of the channels are exported, the 5.1 discrete channels play as desired on my 5.1 theater system.

Any chance of getting a UI exception and landing these (the login/logout) into Oneiric?

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Kirkland: I think the UI exception would be fine here; there's no documentation or screenshots to break, only people's eardrums ;-)

It would be possible to very easily publish Dolby Stereo ("Dolby Surround") 3.1 versions. Here the single surround is encoded with a phase-shift onto main Stereo pair.

What I'm /unclear/ about is the technical situation for automatic down-mixing, such that it always plays on everyone's computers automatically.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Well, that .flac "just worked" on this machine; but the fading it very noticeable; when it's down-mixed it would be ideal if the overall mix stayed at roughly the same level.

[Wayne Rodrigues (waynerod10)]

Seems like a very nice feature. Great work!

However, as Paul Sladen mentioned, it might be tricky getting it to run on everyone's computer.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

At first glance: If you start adding 5.1 sounds, they should be in a separate directory, and you need to modify index.theme accordingly. See http://0pointer.de/public/sound-theme-spec.html

I also think you need to ship both the 5.1 and the stereo version, so I guess this is also a CD space question.

Other than that, I like the idea. It's almost as good as my idea of having the current release's animal roar/meow as login sound ;-)

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