Rockbox

Some feel that speaking "Loading" when anew track is selected is
annoying, particularly if music is already playing.

I don't find it particularly annoying myself, but it is inelegant. It
would however be appropriate to give confirmation of the key press and an
indication that a possibly longish delay should be expected.

Here's a suggestion for an alternative. Instead of a voice clip that
speaks "Loading", how about a small unobtrusive sound clip? It's more
discreet, feels smoother.

I used to use a nice tiny chirping sound called twip.wav. Not sure where
I got that, google finds a reference that indicates it may be from OS/2.

I found another clip, almost as nice, that should be freely redistributable.
/usr/share/sounds/gtk-events/activate.wav
on my machine, belongs to the gnome-audio RPM, which is (supposedly)
LGPL.
Uploaded as LANG_WAIT.wav.

Put LANG_WAIT.wav under tools/, and apply the patch.

The patch also moves and adds a couple of LANG_WAIT splashes. I haven't
tested all the cases. The idea is that the splash makes sense only if it
is executed before a disk spin up is triggered.

audio_play() calls talk_force_shutup(), so that this splash is often not
heard at all, especially on flash-based players. This works out well when
operations preceding audio_play() need to spin up the disk. It does
however needlessly suppress the splash when the only delay comes from
buffering the track to play.

The LANG_WAIT splash itself does a shutup, so it would be possible to
remove the shutup from audio_play() (assuming all callers use this
splash, which they pretty much do). However it doesn't seem to work out
so nicely. audio_play() causes the pcm buffer data to be scrapped in many
cases. Also in some cases I've heard the splash half a second AFTER the
new track has started, presumably due to the voice thread being delayed,
possibly because of the codec swapping... Playing the wait clip after the
fact sounds quite horrible, so I'll leave the shutup in place in
audio_play() until a way can be found to force the wait clip to play
while buffering is taking place.

Please let me know whether this solution takes the annoyance out of the
wait splash and whether it sounds good or not.

 apps/filetree.c        |    7 +++----
 apps/lang/english.lang |    2 +-
 apps/playlist_viewer.c |    2 ++
 apps/tagtree.c         |    2 ++
 apps/tree.c            |    2 ++
 tools/FILES            |    1 +
 tools/voice.pl         |    4 ++--
 7 files changed, 13 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)