RE: Error beep (Was CI: Migrating...)

["Timothy Olson" TLO@xxxxxxxx]

Harry Binswanger wrote:


>My normal Error Beep setting is inaudible -- I dislike squeaks and
>beeps. But, if I set EB to, say, 2000,15000, I do get a beep every
>time. Hardware may be a factor.

BTW, what does each number represent, because I can't find any linear
relationship by playing around with them. Maybe 32k is the limit for each?


The values for EB are for pitch and duration, respectively. Of course, these values are now largely
irrelevant on today's fast machines, where, even if a pitch can be heard, the number of cycles for
the duration goes by so fast that it's more of a click than a beep. According to my experiments with
this years ago (in 3.55+), 65,334 was the maximum value for duration. Any value larger than that
worked, but in effect had 65,334 subtracted from it. (For example, "65,335" was equivalent
to "1".)

I played around with the EB just for fun years ago. Some of my 3.55+ programs would take several
minutes to run (on a then-286), so a musical fanfare at the end, arrived at through use of changing
the EB and generating "fake" errors (usually "No command"), would alert the user
that the program had finished. I'm a classically trained musician, so among my "error
beep" fanfares were Beethoven's 5th motif, "Charge!" Sousa's "Stars &
Stripes", and a simple dominant-tonic (V-I) cadence. (I even wrote a "Happy Birthday"
program for my wife that would play the song as it spelled out the words on the screen. Guess I
didn't have anything better to do.) The various pitches were achieved by finding an error beep value
that was close to A-440 (my "starting point," since that's what pitch we tune to), then
multiplying in either direction by the 12th root of 2 to get the pitches of the scale. According to
my notes, curiously, a LOWER number meant a HIGHER pitch.

Well, that's everything you didn't want to know about the EB.


--TLO
Timothy_Olson@xxxxxxxx
(630) 668-8310 x327