Is Ear Candy a Waste of Noise?

Recently reading about Vista’s ear-candy, it reminded me why I hate the stuff. (Ear candy that is. Haven’t had the pleasure of Vista yet.) I could make silly jokes about it getting stuck inside your ears and all, but I’ll spare you.

Admittedly, Apple probably invented ear-candy with it’s original ding having a much greater richness than the beep on PCs. Nowadays, especially on OS X and soon Vista, attention to detail and glitzifying extends to every sound your computer can make. If computers burped, you’d be sure they’d now burp in polyphonic-digitally-sampled-bona-fide sound.

But have you ever found when you’re chugging away on an app, with many other apps open, you hear one of those 21st century dings, but “What the flip!” which freakin’ app made the ding? (This is why I love Growl so much.) So you look up and down your Dock trying to deduce which app was the most likely offender. But they all just sit there, smugly staring back at you, daring you to work it out without clicking each of them to find out.

Usually in the end I just say, “Screw you you smug sods, if it’s important enough you’ll start jumping up and down in the Dock like a seven year old boy who waited too long to tell you he needed to go to the toilet.”

Later, when smoke drifts casually from the top of my Mac as if everything is fine and the smoke just thought it would pop out for a stroll around the room in the non-chalant way smoke does when in fact something is seriously wrong, I wish I knew what the ding was. Never mind, as the old proverb says: A smoked Mac plays no ear-candy.

And then there’s the music problem where you crank it up but then have to put up with an assortment of all sorts of system sounds dinging and pinging away, sometimes even louder than your music, and sometimes not, so you miss them and end up with the smoking Mac problem again.

Ear-candy? More like ear-wax. Clogging your ears with delightfully pleasant sounds intended to bring peace, reassurance and sometimes polite warnings about impending doom.

The bouncing Dock icon is much more informative than a lonely ding. Growl notifications are much more useful than a pleasant ca-chang. Eye-candy wins over ear-candy every time.

It could be worse of course. If Apple ditched the sweet sounds and took a more direct approach, installing a klaxon under the hood, which would blare where before were pleasant dings, thus perforating your ear drums, rattling the teeth out of your head, and creating a serious laundry problem in your underwear.

Our own reader, Beeblebrox, has been asking around lately if there’s a controller available for OS X that lets you set each application’s volume independently.  Not to disparage the winners of the recent competition, but now that’s what I call a dream app.

That does have a down side in that if you set the volume of system sounds down, you won’t hear them over music, so you still get Smokey the Mac. But hey, it seems that problem exists either way, so come developers, give us independent volume control.

At the end of the day (actually, any time during the day) though, ear-candy is only useful when it can be immediately connected to the application generating it. If it can’t be, then it’s just a waste of noise.