Random classical music is played as an error message
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Enough said:
[url]http://support.microsoft.com/kb/261186[/url]
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This has already been posted here. :)
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Well... it's not random and "It's a small, small world" doesn't qualify as classical, at least in my elitist view...
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@TGV said:
Well... it's not random and "It's a small, small world" doesn't qualify as classical, at least in my elitist view...
Well technically Fur Elise would count as Classical music, though it's borderline Romantic I guess.
And though the occurrence is obviously not random as it indicates something specific, the choice is totally random and weird.
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I had a fan on my Cyrix M1 that would play "Fur Elise" if the speed fell too low. I hadn't realized that some BIOSes had this built in as well (my motherboard plays two tones that sound like the siren on a French emergency vehicle if a sensor goes out of range-- and it does so for a second or two every time my motherboard monitor starts. Stupid and annoying.
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I think we need to make the distinction here between Classical and classical music.
If something is Classical, it was composed between approx. 1750 - 1825, but classical can refer to any music that is not 'popular'.
Fur Elise is most definitely of the classical tradition even if its classification as Classical is debatable.
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lol, this was posted the other day and since then <sarcasm>i've started to have all my error notifications through song. Rather than a nasty modal dialogue saying an error message i just blast a bit of copyright free tunes through the pc speaker, sweet</sarcasm>
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@Daniel15 said:
This has already been posted here. :)
What's really funny is that the first guy who posted it pre-emptively apologized in case it had already been posted, which it hadn't at that time. But this time it actually had already been posted, and no apology! I want my apology! Repost! Repost!
I think this got a pretty high number on digg too.
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This is standard procedure. We use "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" for printer errors, "Four Seasons" for backup issues and some Michael Bolton evergreens when a virus is detected.
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@Kiss me I'm Polish said:
This is standard procedure. We use "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" for printer errors, "Four Seasons" for backup issues and some Michael Bolton evergreens when a virus is detected.
I'm trying to figure out if that's an intentional Office Space reference, or a happy coincidence...
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My only problem is the choice in music. Seeing how they play these songs. Why not "CPU Fan Failure" "Power Fan Failure" "Motherboard Fan Failure" ONCE, then keep with the tune (caz obviously tune is 100x less annoying than the speech). Makes the error more intuitive. O wells.
Though it is retarded that they make it seem like a virus instead of letting the user know there is a major problem. I didn't know about this, good thing to know.
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@dlikhten said:
My only problem is the choice in music. Seeing how they play these songs. Why not "CPU Fan Failure" "Power Fan Failure" "Motherboard Fan Failure" ONCE, then keep with the tune (caz obviously tune is 100x less annoying than the speech). Makes the error more intuitive. O wells.
I think I remember those songs from my piano lessons. That's Bach, right? From the famous collection, "Fan failures for the harpsichord in G minor?"
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When I worked at a HP resellers about 10-15 years ago my boss showed me some button press sequence on a HP printer that would get it to play some old Scottish or Irish tune. Suppose it was to test the speakers or maybe it was just some techy easter egg. Still wish I knew that sequence so I could dazzle easily impressed office workers :¬)
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I got it... Next time my application is in a bad state possibly about to crash or some major f-up causing potentially millions of dollars in losses for a client, instead of error messages I am going to play "who lets the dogs out" on the server's internal speaker!
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Older Macs will play the sound of a car squealing its tires and crashing if they start up with a hardware problem. That makes it pretty clear that something's wrong.
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@dlikhten said:
My only problem is the choice in music. Seeing how they play these songs. Why not "CPU Fan Failure" "Power Fan Failure" "Motherboard Fan Failure" ONCE, then keep with the tune (caz obviously tune is 100x less annoying than the speech). Makes the error more intuitive. O wells.
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
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@seaturnip said:
@dlikhten said:
My only problem is the choice in music. Seeing how they play these songs. Why not "CPU Fan Failure" "Power Fan Failure" "Motherboard Fan Failure" ONCE, then keep with the tune (caz obviously tune is 100x less annoying than the speech). Makes the error more intuitive. O wells.
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
This is not actually true, despite all the effort that Creative Labs spend trying to convince people of it in the 90s. The quality is not great and the CPU load is significant, but you can generate full-spectrum audio from the standard PC speaker.
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In fact, there was software used in some games in the 1980s and 1990s called Realsound that output PCM audio at a very low bit rate through the speaker. In addition, I know that some recent motherboards actually speak POST error messages through the speaker instead of using beep codes.
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@operagost said:
In fact, there was software used in some games in the 1980s and 1990s called Realsound that output PCM audio at a very low bit rate through the speaker [...]
Yeah, I was impressed when I heard it in "Countdown" for the first time :
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@seaturnip said:
@dlikhten said:
My only problem is the choice in music. Seeing how they play these songs. Why not "CPU Fan Failure" "Power Fan Failure" "Motherboard Fan Failure" ONCE, then keep with the tune (caz obviously tune is 100x less annoying than the speech). Makes the error more intuitive. O wells.
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
Hahahaha, yeah thats right, it can only output Square waves.... WTF
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@operagost said:
In addition, I know that some recent motherboards actually speak POST error messages through the speaker instead of using beep codes.
I had one of those, an Asus A8n-sli deluxe IIRC (socket 939). That's also the one renowned for having its 8000rpm northbridge fan seize up, making the computer act very odd. Specifically, on startup, it would speak "Bridge Fan Failed". A little WD40 got it back to its old self.
Though that's not as odd as my server recently, when its northbridge cooler "fell off" while the machine was on. I didn't notice for weeks, the machine was still running fine except for the occasional disk read error (1 byte in 10GB). I'd expect a chip that came with a heatsink and fan to do something more drastic when cooling vanished altogether. I guess they don't build chipsets like they used to.
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@Helix said:
@seaturnip said:
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
Hahahaha, yeah thats right, it can only output Square waves.... WTF
The actual limitation is that square waves are the only thing it can generate precisely. Generating other waves requires some timing trickery and CPU-intensive preprocessing, and it's a little imprecise - it sounds rather like a pocket 2-way radio, with crackles and fuzz. It also has only about 15kHz of bandwidth (no treble or bass).
The quality is good enough for speech. Not good enough for string concertos.
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@asuffield said:
The quality is good enough for speech. Not good enough for string concertos.
So we need better PC speakers.
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@dhromed said:
@asuffield said:
The quality is good enough for speech. Not good enough for string concertos.
So we need better PC speakers.
... or worst string concertos
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@Helix said:
@seaturnip said:
@dlikhten said:
My only problem is the choice in music. Seeing how they play these songs. Why not "CPU Fan Failure" "Power Fan Failure" "Motherboard Fan Failure" ONCE, then keep with the tune (caz obviously tune is 100x less annoying than the speech). Makes the error more intuitive. O wells.
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
Hahahaha, yeah thats right, it can only output Square waves.... WTF
Square waves? I thought it was limited to triangles...
Though, why not a siren-like sound, WHY A TUNE? Honestly.
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@Thief^ said:
@operagost said:
In addition, I know that some recent motherboards actually speak POST error messages through the speaker instead of using beep codes.
I had one of those, an Asus A8n-sli deluxe IIRC (socket 939). That's also the one renowned for having its 8000rpm northbridge fan seize up, making the computer act very odd. Specifically, on startup, it would speak "Bridge Fan Failed". A little WD40 got it back to its old self.
My A7V333 very insistently announces "No CPU installed. No CPU installed." on bootup.
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@Tann San said:
When I worked at a HP resellers about 10-15 years ago my boss showed me some button press sequence on a HP printer that would get it to play some old Scottish or Irish tune.
But can it play Blue Danube, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, and Blue Danube?
http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/highlights/
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@asuffield said:
@Helix said:
@seaturnip said:
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
Hahahaha, yeah thats right, it can only output Square waves.... WTF
The actual limitation is that square waves are the only thing it can generate precisely. Generating other waves requires some timing trickery and CPU-intensive preprocessing, and it's a little imprecise - it sounds rather like a pocket 2-way radio, with crackles and fuzz. It also has only about 15kHz of bandwidth (no treble or bass).
The quality is good enough for speech. Not good enough for string concertos.
My understanding is that attempts to output more complex waveforms depend on abusing secondary properties of a given PC speaker, so it wouldn't work well in general for applications to attempt to do it. For a BIOS though I guess it is more reasonable since it is tied to a particular motherboard anyway.
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@asuffield said:
@Helix said:
@seaturnip said:
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
Hahahaha, yeah thats right, it can only output Square waves.... WTF
The actual limitation is that square waves are the only thing it can generate precisely. Generating other waves requires some timing trickery and CPU-intensive preprocessing, and it's a little imprecise - it sounds rather like a pocket 2-way radio, with crackles and fuzz. It also has only about 15kHz of bandwidth (no treble or bass).
The quality is good enough for speech. Not good enough for string concertos.
Yup, it's called Pulse Width Modulation. It lets one approximate non-square waves, but note "approximate."
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@seaturnip said:
My understanding is that attempts to output more complex waveforms depend on abusing secondary properties of a given PC speaker, so it wouldn't work well in general for applications to attempt to do it.
They're all essentially identical, so it works well enough. There's really only one way to build a speaker for less than one cent.
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Ha, yeah, I suppose.
Speaking of PC speakers. I hate the way that in Windows, when I pipe something to the command prompt terminal and it turns out that it's binary data, I get all this loud PC speaker beeping because of the ASCII beep control code characters. And each beep freezes the command prompt while it plays so it's difficult to Ctrl-C out of it to stop the noise that is irritating all my coworkers and making them ask what the hell I'm doing. Does anyone know of a means of mitigating this problem in software?
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@seaturnip said:
Speaking of PC speakers. I hate the way that in Windows, when I pipe something to the command prompt terminal and it turns out that it's binary data, I get all this loud PC speaker beeping because of the ASCII beep control code characters. And each beep freezes the command prompt while it plays so it's difficult to Ctrl-C out of it to stop the noise that is irritating all my coworkers and making them ask what the hell I'm doing. Does anyone know of a means of mitigating this problem in software?
Cygwin bash. cmd.exe is a piece of crap.
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@asuffield said:
@Helix said:
@seaturnip said:
This is a PC speaker, it isn't capable of speech. It can only output square waves.
Hahahaha, yeah thats right, it can only output Square waves.... WTF
The actual limitation is that square waves are the only thing it can generate precisely. Generating other waves requires some timing trickery and CPU-intensive preprocessing, and it's a little imprecise - it sounds rather like a pocket 2-way radio, with crackles and fuzz. It also has only about 15kHz of bandwidth (no treble or bass).
The quality is good enough for speech. Not good enough for string concertos.
The actual limitation is that no speaker can output square waves. However square(ish) waves may be the input.
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@seaturnip said:
Speaking of PC speakers. I hate the way that in Windows, when I pipe something to the command prompt terminal and it turns out that it's binary data, I get all this loud PC speaker beeping because of the ASCII beep control code characters. And each beep freezes the command prompt while it plays so it's difficult to Ctrl-C out of it to stop the noise that is irritating all my coworkers and making them ask what the hell I'm doing. Does anyone know of a means of mitigating this problem in software?
sc config beep start= disabledThis will disable the beep driver and silence the PC speaker completely in Windows (the alternate is to open your computer case and disconnect the cables with which the speaker is connected).
