Notification sound

[larrasket]

It would be helpful if there could be a notification sound, which can be configurable from the settings (enable/disable). This is extra helpful when you are not watching but you would like to observe comments every once and a while.

[Et0h]

Thanks for your suggestion.

Syncplay is not intended to be a general purpose chat application, and so your requested feature is not likely to be one that we will implement, but it is useful to know how people use our software.

As noted at #315 there are a variety of reasons why we do not try to do everything as we only have a small developer team and are reluctant to increase the complexity of the software.

I anticipate that developing, testing and maintaining audio support across a lot of operating systems (including many flavours of Linux) would be quite a commitment.

[gilgulgamesh]

Hi, I was thinking about how nice it would be to have a notification system, for if the user isn't focused on mpv/syncplay

I understand that it's not a general chat application, but it would really help with "are you ready" "what?? i was on there, i messaged you, I barely left..." (which really affected me when i had auditory processing issues, but affects anyone who's muted when someone else starts)

I'd be keen to put some work into figuring this out too ^^ I know cross platform notifications are a pain... but i think it's worth it

i also think text should stay on screen while things are paused, like how it works if you press enter and stay in the chat interface -- or even until user refocuses. The more i think about it, this is a focus-based behaviour(/protocol)

(also huge thank you for this software, it's really helped me during some hard times)

[Et0h]

I agree it might be nice to have, but I've just looked into it again and it seems that implementing notification sounds could introduce additional dependencies and cross-platform compatibility issues. There are also so many potential use cases to consider that it could add quite a bit of complexity to the configuration.

The suggested focus-based behaviour would introduce further complexity. Keeping old messages visible could also be misleading without timestamps to indicate when they were sent.

As such, I have no plans to implement these features at this time.

For messages disappearing too quickly, you can increase the timeouts used in the mpv OSD for Syncplay messages by editing your Syncplay configuration file (syncplay.ini).

On Windows, this is normally located in %APPDATA%\Syncplay\.

Close Syncplay, open the file in a text editor, and find the [GUI] section. You can then add or change the following settings:

chatTimeout = 30
notificationTimeout = 30
alertTimeout = 30

• chatTimeout controls how long chat messages remain visible.
• notificationTimeout controls how long ordinary notifications remain visible.
• alertTimeout controls how long alert messages remain visible.

These values are in seconds, so you can adjust them to suit your preferences.

Save the file and restart Syncplay for the changes to take effect.