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[This is for after the 4.0 push] It seems like there would be useful oportunities to have sound in the IDE in key places ( see http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=27150 ). However, my concern is that if people start adding sounds wherever they feel like it, we'll get chaos. There should be some set of standards to tell when sound should or should not be used, as well as a conventional place to turn it on and off.
I think the best solution would be to have sound integration performed by a separate module. That would ensure that sound configuration is done from a single place; it would also mean that users who don't want it can get rid of the module etc. I have written such a module - I can contribute it if there is interest (I wrote it to solve my own problem - see #27150). It contains two major hacks: - I only want sounds to be produced when the NetBeans window is invisible/in the background/iconified/ etc. There's no reason to beep to tell me that the debugger stopped when I'm looking at it. But discovering when a window is made invisible appears to be impossible in Java. (Hint: componentHidden() is not the right answer). I think the solution is to use Focus as the key; it's not as accurate as visibility but probably generally okay: if no NetBeans window has focus, the user is probably looking elsewhere and sound is okay. - In the debugger case I can accurately know when the debugger has stopped (by registering a listener with the top debugger and checking the state transitions it's broadcasting.) But the other case I added: beeping when a build completes or fails (and the window is invisible), required me to use a hack to determine when the build has stopped: string matching on the statusText area. (The compilation engine does not offer any notification mechanism.)
Torbjorn, I know your post is really old, but if your module is still being maintained and I can add it to my installation, I'd love to have it. I like a lot of things about Netbeans, but the annoying beeping on undesirable occasions is not one of them!