[R] Re: your mail

Prof Brian D Ripley
Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:05:50 -0000

On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Pesl Thomas wrote:

> Dear R-friends,
>
> i just look at http://www.statistik.uni-dortmund.de/leute/ligges.htm to
> download scatterplot3 and saw a write and read wav-files library. So i
> wondered if R can play wav-files. This would be very practical, espacially
> when you do some long computations.
> If not, can R play a system beep or something like that?

R can only do these things on hardware that supports it.... On most
systems ASCII char 7 (\a) will beep.  E.g. on my Sun

cat("\a")

will sound the bell (actually flash the terminal as I have visual bell
set). I believe that works on Windows too (it certainly has in the past)
but as I have my sound card muted I would not notice.

On Windows R can play .wav files (and anything else the OS can handle)
via the shell.exec function.  That's the general soulution here: use the OS
to do the things it is good at, and R for the things it is good at.

--
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595