Is Ear Candy a Waste of Noise?

by Chris Howard Nov 22, 2006

Recently reading about Vista’s ear-candy, it reminded me why I hate the stuff. (Ear candy that is. Haven’t had the pleasure of Vista yet.) I could make silly jokes about it getting stuck inside your ears and all, but I’ll spare you.

Admittedly, Apple probably invented ear-candy with it’s original ding having a much greater richness than the beep on PCs. Nowadays, especially on OS X and soon Vista, attention to detail and glitzifying extends to every sound your computer can make. If computers burped, you’d be sure they’d now burp in polyphonic-digitally-sampled-bona-fide sound.

But have you ever found when you’re chugging away on an app, with many other apps open, you hear one of those 21st century dings, but “What the flip!” which freakin’ app made the ding? (This is why I love Growl so much.) So you look up and down your Dock trying to deduce which app was the most likely offender. But they all just sit there, smugly staring back at you, daring you to work it out without clicking each of them to find out.

Usually in the end I just say, “Screw you you smug sods, if it’s important enough you’ll start jumping up and down in the Dock like a seven year old boy who waited too long to tell you he needed to go to the toilet.”

Later, when smoke drifts casually from the top of my Mac as if everything is fine and the smoke just thought it would pop out for a stroll around the room in the non-chalant way smoke does when in fact something is seriously wrong, I wish I knew what the ding was. Never mind, as the old proverb says: A smoked Mac plays no ear-candy.

And then there’s the music problem where you crank it up but then have to put up with an assortment of all sorts of system sounds dinging and pinging away, sometimes even louder than your music, and sometimes not, so you miss them and end up with the smoking Mac problem again.

Ear-candy? More like ear-wax. Clogging your ears with delightfully pleasant sounds intended to bring peace, reassurance and sometimes polite warnings about impending doom.

The bouncing Dock icon is much more informative than a lonely ding. Growl notifications are much more useful than a pleasant ca-chang. Eye-candy wins over ear-candy every time.

It could be worse of course. If Apple ditched the sweet sounds and took a more direct approach, installing a klaxon under the hood, which would blare where before were pleasant dings, thus perforating your ear drums, rattling the teeth out of your head, and creating a serious laundry problem in your underwear.

Our own reader, Beeblebrox, has been asking around lately if there’s a controller available for OS X that lets you set each application’s volume independently.  Not to disparage the winners of the recent competition, but now that’s what I call a dream app.

That does have a down side in that if you set the volume of system sounds down, you won’t hear them over music, so you still get Smokey the Mac. But hey, it seems that problem exists either way, so come developers, give us independent volume control.

At the end of the day (actually, any time during the day) though, ear-candy is only useful when it can be immediately connected to the application generating it. If it can’t be, then it’s just a waste of noise.

Comments

  • Chris, you can easily rout your alerts different ways. I have a DAC connected via USB, yet systemsounds are played only via internal speakers. Plus you do not need system sounds (unless you are out of the room). If you do, please name a few instances where there is no corresponding visual pointer.

    Bad Beaver had this to say on Nov 22, 2006 Posts: 371
  • Your “dream app” has been around for a number of years - it’s called Detour, and it was made freeware maybe two years ago.  It’s available from the dudes at Rogue Amoeba (http://www.rogueamoeba.com).

    44$rqs:XWEnQ had this to say on Nov 23, 2006 Posts: 13
  • Detour is not universal and is no longer supported.  Apple needs to incorporate this into the OS like Vista already does.

    The bouncing Dock icon is much more informative than a lonely ding.

    I actually find the bouncing icon kind of annoying.  I prefer the XP method of highlighting the updated app in the taskbar.  Nitpicky, I suppose, but this kind of a nitpicky topic.

    Beeblebrox had this to say on Nov 23, 2006 Posts: 2220
  • SiRGadaBout, unfortunately Detour doesn’t work on Intel.

    Bad Beaver, good point. I’ll have to dig them up.

    Beeb, yeah, as I implied with my “seven year old” quip.

    Maybe Apple needs to do a Windows - and offer multiple choices. Give multiple choices on how an app communicates visually (or aurally) that it needs attention. But it’s not like Apple to give users multiple choices - just look at the Appearance preferences; or the Dock settings - only two minimize effects even though three are built in. Excuse my sarcasm, but geez Apple, are Mac users really that stupid that more than two options would fry their brains? Oops, hang on, we do get three options on where the Dock goes.

    Chris Howard had this to say on Nov 23, 2006 Posts: 1209
  • I dislike the Dock-jump too. Especially for Eudora, can’t have it jump all the time just because new Spam arrived. Would be cool if one could either massively slow the jumping or have the icon just jump once and freeze at the peak so it is visible even when the Dock is not.

    Bad Beaver had this to say on Nov 23, 2006 Posts: 371
  • I can hear it now, an office full of macs dinging and boinking along… Visuals will always win out because not everyone has thier volume up if they have speakers, and in alot of companies it’s frowned on to have speakers on at all.

    xwiredtva had this to say on Nov 24, 2006 Posts: 172
  • I can hear it now, an office full of macs dinging and boinking along

    Awhile back I taught a class with a room full of G3s w/ OS 9.  And if you recall, when OS 9 crashed (which was invariably), it not only BONGED, but the whole system went down with it.  So in this class, it was like a symphony of BONGS every day.  What fun.

    Beeblebrox had this to say on Nov 24, 2006 Posts: 2220
  • Bad Beaver said: If you do, please name a few instances where there is no corresponding visual pointer.

    Ah! I’ve been on the lookout as I said and discovered that the problem is the problem!

    For instance, my Mac just dinged but no visual clue. And I’ve got no idea which app generated it.  So I’ve got no way of answering your question.

    Earlier audio started playing. Again no visual clues. After a bit of stuffing around, I believe it was a web page with sound built-in.

    So, all this proves my point (which isn’t nitpicky) that “ear-candy is only useful when it can be immediately connected to the application generating it.”

    Chris Howard had this to say on Nov 25, 2006 Posts: 1209
  • Sorry, Chris, I’m not trying to use “nitpicky” in a derogatory sense.  I only mean that in the grand scheme of things, it’s a little (and easily fixable one would think) issue. 

    One could argue, and I would agree, that the little things add up to an overall user experience.  It’s the little things that give Apple the edge in many areas, particularly in case/hardware design. 

    So no offense intended.

    Beeblebrox had this to say on Nov 25, 2006 Posts: 2220
  • Chris: This could be an Mailprogramm hitting the wall at a POP.

    Bad Beaver had this to say on Nov 25, 2006 Posts: 371
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