(INTERNAL) How do I get IDL to just generate an alert tone or a beep sound that is also platform independent?
Anonym
QUESTION:
How do I get IDL to just generate an alert tone or a beep sound that is also platform independent?
ANSWER:
There is an old *undocumented* IDL procedure "BEEP" which, on systems that support it, causes a short "beep" to occur. A system will need the correct sound hardware and configuration (whatever that may be) to get this to work.
Note that being an undocumented feature, it is also not officially tested, and its implementation may be removed or altered without notice. However, associated to the BEEP routine is a feature request asking to formally document and support BEEP:
IDL-38025
An alternative approach for generating a tone might be to spawn an "echo" of the ASCII "beep" character 7b, that is:
IDL> spawn,'echo '+string(7b)
Again, whether or not this can work will depend on if there is the proper underlying operating system, hardware and configuration settings on the machine.
Still another approach might be to develop some sort of Java solution that can be called from IDL (IDL-Java Import Bridge). If needed, perhaps PSG could help with this.
Reviewed for internal by JU (26-jan-2015)