Re: The joys of modifying windows sounds...
You are me AICMFP.
I played around with sound files on my home machines, not work, having been on the wrong end of just how irritating 'personalised' system sounds can be for other people.
My two main sources of entertainment were 2001 and TOS, with an exception for a snatch of dialogue from a generic American 'comedy' movie, where the driver of a car says to the other occupants "Everyone remember where we parked"* for my hard-disk shutdown alert (there was a time that hard disk heads had to be explicitly parked in an area away from the data tracks before disk power-off).
In the time after everyone though digital watches were cool, flip-phones that resembled the TOS communicators became cool in their turn, and I spent some time trying to get my Motorola flip-phone to make the distinctive chirping when flipped open.
Customising system sounds and mobile phone noises lost its charm after a few days.
I remain impressed with Apple's attention to detail on sounds - if I remember correctly, sounds are triggered by events, but played by a separate server/thread so they do not block execution and can play to completion; and multiple sounds can play simultaneously so that fade-out of an original sound does not get abruptly cut off by a new sound being triggered. Trivial, maybe, but a detail many applications do not get right.
I still enjoy the (memory of the) soundscape of the 'Lunatic Fringe' game add-in module for the After Dark screensaver for the original Macs. Lost to bit-rot, I fear.
*Way, way before Kirk said it in one of the Star Trek films, or Homer Simpson, for that matter.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
