I am not sure GNOME Media, as such, can solve this.

Bastien, do you think we should have a handler in gnome-settings-daemon (or whatever daemon as plugins framework for small things like that)

What about conflicting setup where PA is also installed with the x-bell handler?

Should this be a distribution issue instead?

I can agree with Felipe that those loud beep are awful, and still exists on debian (I had the same issue a few days ago too). Ubuntu has probably disabled the pcspkr module.

Didn't metacity use to hook into the bell event from X?

Some part of GNOME should hook into this event and play some sound using libcanberra.

gnome-settings-daemons:

beta@pipo ~/git/gnome2/gnome-settings-daemon (master)$ ack-grep bell
plugins/keyboard/gsd-keyboard-manager.c
68:#define KEY_BELL_VOLUME   "/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/bell_volume"
69:#define KEY_BELL_PITCH    "/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/bell_pitch"
70:#define KEY_BELL_DURATION "/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/bell_duration"
71:#define KEY_BELL_MODE     "/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/bell_mode"
306:        int              bell_volume;
307:        int              bell_pitch;
308:        int              bell_duration;
320:        bell_volume   = gconf_client_get_int   (client, KEY_BELL_VOLUME, NULL);
322:        bell_pitch    = gconf_client_get_int   (client, KEY_BELL_PITCH, NULL);
323:        bell_duration = gconf_client_get_int   (client, KEY_BELL_DURATION, NULL);
326:        bell_volume   = (volume_string && !strcmp (volume_string, "on")) ? 50 : 0;
360:        kbdcontrol.bell_percent = bell_volume;
361:        kbdcontrol.bell_pitch = bell_pitch;
362:        kbdcontrol.bell_duration = bell_duration;


And metacity has plenty of code in src/core/bell.c about visual bell AND audible bell...

I have no idea how this thing work in the end :)

Reassinging to settings-daemon, they should know.

See bug 474053 for some explanation. Metacity is the app hooking into XKB (which provides the bell handling). The schema to disable the bell by default lives in libgnome.

I'm all for either turning it off or adding a custom sound file to play if enabled by default. Any takers?

'play a less annoying sound' is a dup; marking as such.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 315859 ***