Gnome: Using your own alert sound

As usual with those fancy Gnome themes (as came with Fedora 12 in my case), the basic assumption is that you’re a not-so-clever user, so not too many choices should be left for you. So pick one of those premade alert sounds. Picking your own sound file? Noooo. That’s way too much freedom for a dummy user. So what if that’s possible on Windows? Linux freedom doesn’t mean that end users should get too much control over their computers…

OK, so here’s how to use a custom sound file as your alert. First, generate the desired sound file if necessary, for example, mybeep.ogg, and put is somewhere. Say /usr/share/sounds/ (where there are a lot of other sound clips). Make it a stereo file, possibly WAV (or .ogg) with a sample rate of 44100 Hz.

Then edit /usr/share/gnome-media/sounds/gnome-sounds-default.xml, and add an entry just before the last line (which is </sounds>). It could be something like this:

<sound deleted="false">
 <name>My own beep</name>
 <filename>/usr/share/sounds/mybeep.ogg</filename>
</sound>

All that’s left is to open Preferences > Sound (or gnome-volume-control at the command line) and select the new entry in the list of possible alert sounds.

That’s it. It’s actually simple, once the configuration file is unburied.