Two easy steps to making noises with your app: 1. Determine what application-specific sound events occur, and list them in a filename.soundlist file. For example, the GNOME panel has a panel.soundlist file that looks like: [__section_info__] description=Panel [open] file=panel/slide.wav description=Expand [collapse] file=panel/slide.wav description=Collapse I assume you know how gnome_config stores its data. The basic format here is a special '__section_info__' section with a single key, description=
. The section description should be a nice few words that say "Panel" or "Balsa" or whatever - this will be what the user sees in sound-properties 'category' column. Then there is a section for each possible sound event. The section name would be a unique (to this .soundlist file) ID of the event, and then there would be two items, 'file' and 'description'. The 'file' should be a default filename relative to the GNOME sound file directory (no absolute filenames) that will pick up the sounds installed by the gnome-audio package. The 'description' should be a few words telling what type of event this is - this will be what the user sees in sound-properties 'event' column. In the Makefile.am you will need to put something like soundlistdir = $(sysconfdir)/sound/events soundlist_DATA = filename.soundlist to get the .soundlist file installed. 2. Put the event triggers into your source code. To trigger a specific sound event, you do gnome_triggers_do("string describing the event in detail - not used for now", NULL, "filename", "event", NULL); Now you remember you called your file "filename.soundlist"? You stick that "filename" part in place of "filename" in the above function call. Then you put in the "event" name which is the string inside the []'s So for the panel to indicate a collapse event to the world it would be: gnome_triggers_do("", NULL, "panel", "collapse", NULL); The panel actually does: static const char *supinfo[] = {"panel", "collapse", NULL}; gnome_triggers_vdo("", NULL, supinfo); which is equivalent but slightly faster. Note that if your app needs more than one category, it can install multiple .soundlist files, but this is not recommended. -- Elliot