Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!usc!ucla-cs!math.ucla.edu!barry@pico.math.ucla.edu
From: barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Attaching sounds to actions?
Message-ID: <992@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 23 Jan 91 22:16:57 GMT
Sender: news@MATH.UCLA.EDU
Distribution: na
Organization: UCLA Dept. of Math, UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
Lines: 84

Here's the answer about how to attach sounds to actions---its
the Unix way, of course!

Lets assume you store all your sounds in /me as .snd files. 
Then you'd do the following:

Login sounds
------------

Put

playsnd /me/my_login_sound.snd

in you .login file

Logout sounds
------------

Put

playsnd /me/my_logout_sound.snd

in your .logout file

Sounds attached to commands
---------------------------

too attach foobar.snd to the command foobar, make the following alias
in your .cshrc file:

alias foobar 'playsnd /me/foobar.snd ; /bin/foobar'

NOTE: you must put the full path name of foobar (here assumed /bin/foobar)
in the alias to avoid a self-referential alias.

Complications:
-------------
If you work in a heterogenous environment---say suns and NeXTs,
then you need to put conditional statements in front of all the
above commands, conditioning on whether you are logged into the NeXT.
A crude way to do this is 
if(`hostname` == my_next_hostname ) <command>
But this is clumsy if you have many NeXTs.

A better way is to see if the NeXT files are present, and use this
to deside. E.g.,

if ( -e "/.NeXT" ) <command>

checks for the existence of the /.NeXT directory.

Q: is there a command that returns "next" as a machine type,
analogous to the sun `arch` command? If so, use this to
query the machine type.

Bugs
----

These sounds don't get executed by the system though---for e.g.,
if you attach a sound to "kill", and then use the Processes panel
to kill an App, it doesn't use your kill. Even if you put it
in the root .cshrc. I suppose you would have to su to root
and change the kill command to a script that read your sound
prior to kill---but thats a little hacky.

Getting sounds
--------------

Well, this is up to you. You can always record them through the
built in mike using SoundPlayer---though these are of lesser quality.
If anyone out there has a high quality (digital ears) recording setup,
I'm looking for a few good Arnold Schwarzenneger quotes. 
For the moment, I'm making do with my Arnold imitation, which
eventually I'll replace with Arnold himself, via the builtin mike.

If anyone has a digitial ears setup, post some good sounds to the archives.

Have fun.

--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)