Have you ever installed a sound theme in Ubuntu? No? Well you wouldn’t be alone. Finding extra sound themes for Ubuntu is a task and half in and of itself, and that’s before the rather archaic installation process.
Dylan McCall, seemingly frustrated by the lack of refinement in packaging and promoting of sound themes for Ubuntu, has ideas on how finding and installing sound themes in Ubuntu could be made better. He’s knocked up a prototype ‘Sound theme gallery’ where one can preview sound themes without the need to download. Also provided are download links and a quick ‘how-to’ on installing Sound themes in Ubuntu.
You can visit the gallery, which is a prototype/proof of concept rather than a fully stocked audio armoury, at the link below.
To previous the various sounds within a theme just move your mouse cursor along the length of the ‘horizontal bar’ housing the name, download links etc. The various sounds will play.
Experimental
In his mailing list post announcing the project he writes: –
“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.
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 caveats aside, I’m wondering about everyone else’s thoughts on sound themes in general and my mutant side-project here.”