xbelld is a tiny utility to aid people who either don't like the default PC speaker beep, or (like me) use an ALSA driver that doesn't yet have support for the PC speaker (e.g. the AD1981 chipset in the snd_hda_intel driver, as of 2008-04-06).

xbelld performs a given action every time the X bell is rung. The actions xbelld can currently perform include running a specified program, emulating the PC speaker beep using your sound card (default), or playing a PCM encoded WAVE file. The actions involving the sound card are only avail- able if xbelld is compiled with ALSA support. To convert your favourite files to a PCM encoded WAVE file, use

mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm:fast:file=out.wav audio_file

xbelld can also throttle the bell if it is rung too often (e.g. some terminal program goes crazy), and/or disable the audible bell (so that you don't get the annoying PC speaker beep in addition to your xbelld action).

Changes

You can browse the source online, or just view the ChangeLog

Packages

• Gentoo There's no official ebuild yet. But since I use Gentoo, I wrote an ebuild and submited it on the Gentoo Bugzilla. If it's not yet in portage, you can track it via the Gentoo Bug. (You should be able to version bump it to work for the latest release.)