{"id":160,"date":"2006-01-01T17:30:35","date_gmt":"2006-01-01T06:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=160"},"modified":"2006-01-01T17:30:35","modified_gmt":"2006-01-01T06:30:35","slug":"sound-levels-hierarchy-a-half-baked-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/01\/01\/sound-levels-hierarchy-a-half-baked-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Sound Levels Hierarchy &#8211; A Half Baked Idea"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At its heart it&#8217;s a simple concept. Every type of sound that your computer makes is mapped onto a tree; an inheritance hierarchy, which carries enough information to the computer to explain <em>how<\/em> the sound is to be played.<\/p>\n<p>Each program looks up the sound in the hierarchy. For example:<\/p>\n<p><code><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Soundtrack.Background.iTunes.SleepTimePlayList<\/li>\n<li>Soundtrack.Movie.RealMedia<\/li>\n<li>Alert.Summoning.SoftPhone.IncomingCall.ExternalCall<\/li>\n<li>Alert.Reminder.Office.TaskReminder<\/li>\n<li>Effect.StartUp.WindowsXP.LogIn<\/li>\n<li>Effect.Game.Reward.Small.Pacman.GhostSwallow\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/code>The attributes of each node mainly represent the volume (absolute, or relative to the parent), but that&#8217;s not all. It also represents which sound-card and speakers should be used, the balance, the equalizer settings, etc.<\/p>\n<p>If an entry isn&#8217;t present, it just inherits from the parent entry. Each one entry can be tweaked individually, or in a group, to an optimal level for your environment.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps an overlay is required to allow all PacMan sounds to be muted in one operation, or perhaps profiles to allow you to mute all Soundtracks while on a call.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps then, I won&#8217;t need to spend all my time adjusting the volume as I swap between programs, or annoying the next-door neighbours when the Windows startup sound blasts out of my rebooting home PC shortly after listening to a poor-quality podcast.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps then I could have my office PC summon me through the speakers to attend an important meeting, but push iTunes only through the headphones, so my neighbours don&#8217;t need to listen to my taste in music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At its heart it&#8217;s a simple concept. Every type of sound that your computer makes is mapped onto a tree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25,34,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-software-development","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}