Add sounds to your too-quiet AutoLisp utility

Add audible feedback “sounds” to brighten your AutoLISP functions

Pretty much the totality of my AutoLISP customization has been mute. Last week I decided that it was time to make a little noise.

For example, if my function failed for some reason (operator input error or premature program exit), I wanted the tool to not just issue a little message to the command window… I wanted it to be accompanied with a clundge sound.

(acet-sys-beep …)

A search turned up a couple methods to embed some simple sounds into an AutoLISP function. The one way that seemed to work for me was using a call to “acet-sys-beep”  and this only after I installed the “Express tool” option that comes on the AutoCAD install CD.

But once in place, there were three different sounds I could generate from this call. If you want to experiment, type each of these at the “Command:” prompt (if you don’t hear a thing, you may need to check for existence of the AutoCAD ”EXPRESSTOOLS” on your machine):

• (acet-sys-beep 16) [Enter]
• (acet-sys-beep 48) [Enter]
• (acet-sys-beep 64) [Enter]

Sample Utility that invokes a couple different sounds

Here’s an example function showing how two different sounds can be tied into success and failure of a function. This tool just swaps tag-ID values between two picked AutoCAD Electrical components. If the components are different types, then an error dialog is accompanied by a bad sound. If success, then a more happy sound.

This is not rocket-science. But it makes my mundane utility just a bit more interesting.

The two places where the sound is invoked is highlighted below. Just to be safe, in both places there is a call to confirm that function (acet-sys-beep…) exists… before trying to call it.

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