We need new sounds in Mac OS X. You’ve probably heard every one of the current sounds listed on the right, and you might even cringe a little when thinking of some of them. Bottle is too strident, too high-frequency. Morse and Purr aren’t cleanly recorded—listen and you’ll hear noise in there. Others like Sosumi, Basso, and Frog are so low-fidelity they’re sad.

They’re all too old, too simple, too unsubtle. And we need all the subtlety we can get these days.

My car beeps at me immediately as soon as I start the car without having yet fastened my seat belt. Though the beeping is premature and might have waited three seconds or so longer, it’s not the quickness that is most annoying, but the actual sound the car makes when it beeps, a sound so grating that you have to respond at once whether you want to or not, simply to shut the thing off. It just cannot be ignored. You might argue that this was the designer’s intention, to get me to fasten that seat belt, but the reality is that the sound is so maddeningly bad that it sometimes has the opposite effect of making me forget what it is I need to do. Like a bone-shakingly loud klaxon during a fire drill, it makes it hard to think or respond.

In other words, using a sound to get your attention is counter-productive if the sound annoys you, because your own annoyance can distract you from the alert itself.

Sounds designed with care and used with restraint can be powerful and quite useful.

My coffee pot makes a faint beep-beep-beep when it’s done brewing, three little tones so subtle you wouldn’t hear them if you weren’t listening for them, yet so clear you can hear them from across the house if you are listening for them. Great sound choice: unobtrusively polite and respectful of my environment.

Mac OS X doesn’t have sounds like these. It has old clunky sounds, unsubtle sounds that grate. You get fond of them from long familiarity, but they’re pretty bad.

It’s not like Apple doesn’t know how to do great sound. Look at the wonderful sounds in Front Row, not just the banner sounds like the orchestral riff as you choose Music to descend from the main window, but even the little click sounds themselves. Compared to the system sounds in Mac OS X, these Front Row sounds are subtle and complex, and so delightful you probably went back and forth a few times when you first tried Front Row, just to hear those sounds again. That’s the kind of sounds we need in the OS.

Go back and listen to Sosumi in /System/Library/Sounds and notice how low-fidelity it sounds. Now imagine if Apple’s Finder icons looked as bad as that sounds. Why does a sound as poor as that still ship with Mac OS X? It can’t be the hardware. The old limitations are gone: we now have great audio and plenty of memory, CPU, and disk space.

It must just be time and focus. Apple’s been busy since rolling out Mac OS X and just hasn’t gotten around to upgrading the system sounds. Maybe in Leopard.

Friday, June 1st, 2007, 8:39 am    Trackback.