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Mac Chick of The Month

Mac OS X: The William Hung of desktop OS’s

February 17, 2008 by Dr. Macenstein
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Awesomeness, OS X, Opinion, video

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OS X has long been applauded for its beautiful GUI, but little has been made of the audio experience that accompanies OS X’s visuals. Perhaps this is because year after year, as each new version of OS X comes out, the visuals receive countless tweaks â€“ some small, some major â€“ while the audio has remained unchanged. The 14 default sounds you’ll find in Leopard are pretty much the 14 sounds you found in Cheetah. In fact, more than half of them are carryovers from OS 9!

Now granted, not many OS’s out there have put a ton of effort into the audio aspect of their interfaces. Windows, for example, has a bunch more sound effects than OS X, but most are annoying and serve little purpose other than to allow the user to tackily customize their OS, something Apple has decided is not in Apple users’ best interests. Still, I feel OS X is due for a fresh set of sounds. Or at least one. So here’s a plea to Apple to stop neglecting our 3rd most important sense (taste of course being the first, followed by sight), and put a little effort into the audio experience OS X delivers as well. Maybe add some explosion effects and make it 5.1 compatible. People seem to like that.

In a show of just how creative Mac users can be, check out the video below made by (newly) faithful Macenstein reader Mike Solomon over at www.thecleverest.com. Despite the limited set of Mac system sounds Mike had to work with, he was able to put together this musical masterpiece. Confusingly titled “Apple Soundtrack” (well, confusing to Soundtrack users like me, anyway), it was made in GarageBand using only OS X sound effects. It’s pretty cool (but imagine what he could do with one more sound effect!)