Yesterday, I was grumbling about how nothing has really happened for sound themes in Ubuntu. We have one very nice system that is pretty well the same as icons (and gentler because there aren't a million different names for the same sounds and you can omit sounds without breaking things) but nobody's using it. I could grumble more loudly about how disappointing that is, but it won't solve much. There are two particular problems I think we can address:
1: It is difficult to find sound themes. 2: It is difficult to install sound themes. And those both feed into the problem that there are no sound themes, so nobody thinks to make more. I think icons and widget themes have been successful because of services like Gnome Look and deviantART, which make it really easy to browse through the choices and promote the good ones. Those two are very visual, though, so not as useful for sounds. In addition, I'm thinking about sound _themes_. There are lots of packages of individual sounds (as would be useful with Gnome Sound Preferences four years ago), but for this to be useful we need actual installable theme packages. I'm playing with a solution for problem 1, and from there I'm hoping problem 2 will solve itself at some point. (If widget / icon / sound theme archives had their own file extension it would already be solved): http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/soundgallery/ That's my prototype of a little (but, as I learned looking at my clock at 1AM yesterday, not _that_ little) gallery service for sound themes that work in Ubuntu. It would be curated because I would like to encourage consistency in how these things are packaged and because free-for-all user submissions are hard. I threw this together because it felt like an interesting exercise, and I'm hoping I didn't get too carried away :) The site is focused on sound and _depends_ on Javascript with a very new web browser like Firefox 4 (maybe 3.6). As far as I can tell, there are maybe three sound themes out there so this is pretty simple so far (ergo, it's hosted on static html pages as an experiment). I don't intend to add comments at any point because that opens a whole can of worms I don't want to think about, but +/- ratings might be useful in the real thing. I want a way to submit and manage sound themes, so I'll start that off with an email link and make an actual system for it at a later date. I only really want to add features as they become necessary, since this could easily go nowhere. (Besides, any server-side stuff means buying web space that supports Django or convincing a kind soul to host it). I'm also uncertain about the name, since it implies some level of officialness that is not present (this being a spur of the moment thing). Still, those caveets aside, I'm wondering about everyone else's thoughts on sound themes in general and my mutant side-project here. -- Dylan PS: It doubles as a musical instrument, and it will be an even better one with more sound themes / a fast web host / sound samples compressed on the server ;) -- ubuntu-art mailing list ubuntu-art@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
