GNOME 2.24 supports XDG sound themes (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/sound-theme-spec). Unfortunately however right now there is only a single sound theme in existence: the sound-theme-freedesktop (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~mccann/sound-theme-freedesktop/) – which is pretty basic.

Help us change this! There are many web sites like art.gnome.org (http://art.gnome.org/) which provide a large selection of graphical themes for Gtk+, Metacity, icon sets and so on. We want to see a similarly large selection of sound themes available! And we’d like you to contribute to this!

How do you prepare sound themes? Read the XDG Sound Theming (http://0pointer.de/public/sound-theme-spec.html) and the XDG Sound Naming (http://0pointer.de/public/sound-naming-spec.html) specifications. Start with basing your work on the aforementioned sound-theme-freedesktop (http://people.freedesktop.org/~mccann/dist/sound-theme-freedesktop-0.2.tar.bz2). And then just go ahead!

Please note that only subset of the sounds listed in the Sound Naming Specification is currently hooked up properly – i.e. generated when “input feedback” is enabled or triggered by applications. Nonetheless it makes sense to include them in your theme, because eventually they will be hooked up.

When you put a theme together, make sure that you only select sounds that have a sensible Free Software license – or if you have produced them yourself you pick a good license yourself. GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, CC-BY-SA 3.0 and CC-BY 3.0 are good choices.

Not everyone is as lucky as Richard Hughes (http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/) and has a mom who is practically an endless source of special effect sounds. If your mom sucks then don’t despair! The OLPC team has compiled a huge set of Free sounds (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples) that is waiting to be made an XDG sound theme. I am eagerly looking forward to your sound themes that make use of “The Berklee Sampling Archive - Volume 13 - synthesizer - fx (126 samples) spaceships, lasers, explosions, machineguns, glisses” (http://www.archive.org/details/Berklee44v13) to start a war in space each time you click a button on your screen![1]

Footnotes

[1] Free as in free desktops that is.

[2] OK, to be honest I am not actually that eagerly looking forward to that. Spacewar-at-your-fingertips is pretty lame in comparison to a theme called “Richard’s Mom”[3].

[3] You have no idea what all those Hughsie’s-Mom-jokes are about? Then listen to the sound files that are shipped with gnome-power-manager!