I would like to congratulate the ICC on a good-looking and fast desktop client, ICC for Windows. There has been a change in the way that sound files work on this client that is a step back from the functionality offered in Dasher.
In the ICC community, familiarity with systems and sounds is something that people value. An example of this is the female voice that is used to announce checks, checkmates and resigning. There are many thousands of users who take this sound as quintessentially part of ICC. In ICC for Windows, the client no longer uses this voice in-game to announce checkmate or to announce resigning.
As a brief example in Dasher, if I am playing as White and my opponent resigns, the ICC voice satisfyingly states “black resigns”, and vice versa. In the case of a checkmate by either side, the ICC voice announces “checkmate” with satisfying gravitas.
The Dasher functionality has been replaced in ICC for Windows by a reductionist win / lose sound that reminds me of the tune a loudspeaker makes in a supermarket, or even worse, the jingle that Gladys Pugh plays on a glockenspiel in the 1980’s television show Hi-de-Hi, a comedy about life in a Maplin’s holiday camp.
This is not what I expect from a market-leading piece of chess software. As you can see, the problem is not going to be solved by merely replacing the sound files in ICC for Windows’s installation directory. This is because the behaviour in Dasher was dynamic - by which I mean, the sound file changed depending on which colour I was playing as, and depending on how I won a game. This behaviour cannot be replicated in ICC for Windows because there is only one sound file for a “win” and one sound file for a “loss”.
I hope that my request leads to a change of functionality in ICC for Windows, as it is a shame that something so central to ICC is being removed.
