Generating beeps via the sound card (script)

[Lukas Loehrer <listaddr1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

here is a script I thought some people may find useful. It is a
replacement for some of the functions of the "beep" program. Instead
of using the -pc-speaker to generate beeps, it uses the sound card. It
is Heavily inspired by the way the multispeech speech server by Igor
Poretsky generates beeps.

To generate the waveforms, the very useful "tones" program from the
siggen [1] package by Jim Jackson is used. If available, alsa is used
for audio playback, OSS otherwise.

One advantage of this solution over the original beep is that the
volume of the tones can be set accurately via the "-a" option which
accepts values in the range from 0 to 1 (without zero).

The motivation behind this script is that emacspeak with viavoice uses
beep for generating tones and "beep recently stopped working for me after a
kernel update. 

Regards, Lukas

[1] http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/jj/linux/siggen.html

beep