'Basics' (system sounds for Haiku OS)
It reminds me a childhood, warm memories. It was that era, when operating system had a tasty sound… Historically, sounds are used in computers to notify users about errors, events done by program. If you mistaken, you’ll be ‘beeped’! In personal computers, Apple II is considered to be one of the first known examples of using system sounds. Later, it was enhanced with Apple Macintosh, presented in 1984. Several years later, the ‘Multimedia PC’ standard was introduced, when CD-ROMs became to the market. As a result a modified version of Windows 3.0 was released, extended with multimedia. According to 86Box, it was considered to be the first operating system, which defined it’s own start-up and shutdown sounds, as well as sound scheme for user interface. And the last thing to mention: the ‘Plus for Windows 95’ was the sending point to the idea - you can customize your UI listening to your mood… It’s great, isn’t it?
This sound scheme was inspired from Windows 3.1/95/98 and original BeOS sound schemes. In this case BeOS is the great example of simplicity, combined with the colorful experience. The fouth version of BeOS was presented with nine startup sounds and an number of alert sounds.
The idea is to create a sound scheme, which is motivating, simple, and a little bit nolstagic, as this is what best suites with Haiku OS, in my opinion. Also, the resulting sound files should take a little space in the drive. So, I began with the ‘BeStartup.aiff’ (aka short version of ‘NuWorld3.aiff’), ‘12StrStart.aiff’ and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation startup sounds. The musical part of sound files were tuned at C note, and it caught the most of my attention. Especially, the NT 4.0 sound chilled down my spine. After several days of experiment, I became with this:
The 16-bit stereo sound file takes up 658 kilobytes in space. It’s near to the origial BeOS sound is 547 KB at 16-bit Stereo (PCM Wave), and NT 4.0 – 442 KB @ 8-bit Stereo (PCM Wave).
This sound theme was received the 3rd place with 43 points at ‘System Sound Contest’, held by Haiku in 2020.