Panther: Mail sounds and Detour

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
November 5th, 2003 • 10:48 am

Since I have a PowerWave with Apple Pro Speakers and I don’t want all my sounds to come out through the same output (I hate it when an alert noise interferes with my music listening!), I use the excellent Detour utility to send most alert sounds to my G4’s built-in speaker and most music sources to the PowerWave.

The latest version of Detour is Panther-ready. Unfortunately, Panther introduces a change in the sound architecture for the Mail application that renders Detour enable to control the sounds and noises produced by that particular application.

According to the Detour developer, Mail 1.3 utilizes the
default system output device for its sounds, rather than the default output device as it used to in previous versions. Because of this, Detour cannot control the sounds it produces.

Unfortunately, in my case, since other applications work fine with Detour, it means that I can only have Mail play its sounds at maximum volume through my G4’s internal speaker. I cannot ask Detour to turn the volume down for the Mail sounds specifically. So I have to make sure the other sounds I send to the internal speaker are loud enough, and decrease the overall system volume. But the overall system volume interferes with the sound volume for the PowerWave as well. So it’s a bit of a vicious circle.

Sometimes I wish Apple wouldn’t tinker with things that worked fine in previous versions!

The Detour developer couldn’t tell me if or when the issue might be addressed in a future version of the utility.


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