14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, after installing a clean OS X, I was once again exposed to the little sounds that OS X makes. I had forgotten all about the interface sounds, since I had them disabled for so long. Personally I am not a great fan of these interface sounds, especially since I don't like most of them; however, there are a few that would have been nice to have around. OS X doesn't offer much in the way of choice in this respect? either you turn the interface sound on or off, and there is no default way to fine tune them and keep only a certain few, maybe even change the sound for some of the others. As usual, this is a gray area that is filled by developers of third party software such as MooSB.
What it does MooSB is a little piece of software, in the shape of a preference pane that lets you assign sounds to be played when certain events occur.
While this might sound like a piece of software that lets you customize the sounds played by the system, it is not exactly what it seems. True enough, it does let you assign sounds to events, however, these events are totally different than the ones that trigger the interface sounds. So, in a nutshell, this program will not let you change anything about the default interface sounds, but will let you add new ones.
Eventful The events that MooSB lets you assign sounds to deal mostly with attaching and detaching of different devices to the computer as well as mounting or inserting media and launching and closing applications. The program groups everything under tabs such as USB, FireWire, PC Cards, CD/DVD, Drives, Applications and Other.
For all these things, you can assign two sounds, one for when the device, drive or application goes 'on', and one for when it goes 'off.' Within each category, you can specify sounds for each device or volume or application separately, or one single sound for everything.
Assigning sounds Setting this up is pretty straight forward, go to the appropriate tab, select the item you want from the 'on' or 'off' list and then choose the sound from the well below. In this respect, the program is very easy and intuitive, and setting up many devices takes next to no time.
The part where things get complicated is when you want review or make changes. The only way to hear a sound is to select it from the list, thus assigning it to the item, however, if the sound is already assigned, reselecting it will do nothing, and you will have to assign a different sound and then choose the initial one in order to hear it. There is no 'play' button or anything you can use to just hear the sound directly, so you have to jump through a few hoops.
SoundPacks MooSB works with sound packs, which can be downloaded off the Internet. This makes it easy to grab lots of sounds with the same theme in just one go and let the program handle the grunt work.
Since we are on the subject, the default sound pack that comes with the program is atrocious. It has four sound files, named 'happy cow,' 'unhappy cow,' 'happy sheep' and 'unhappy sheep.' While the cow files might stir a smile from those of us who still remember the dogcow of old, the sheep sounds are a joke, the two being so similar you would be very hard pressed to tell the difference between them even after hearing them both several times.
Fortunately, getting new sound packs is an easy affair, just click on the 'Get SoundPacks' button and a list of one that are available and not installed will appear. Just double click on any of them and you are ready to download.
The Good This program makes it easy to assign sounds to all kinds of events that are not covered by the default interface sounds. It is quite easy to set up and use. One click downloading of SoundPacks makes it easy to have lots of sounds with the same theme.
The Bad The default sounds are horrible, and practically useless. The interface makes it hard to hear sounds that have already been assigned to events. Some of the events are very limited in scope and purpose.
The Truth This application is good for adding all sorts of sounds to things like inserting CDs or DVDs or plugging in a digital camera? Moo.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
