Thursday, October 25, 2007

Portal Giveth, and Portal Taketh Away (Outlook Sounds)

If any of you haven't yet played the amazing, wonderful game called Portal, you owe it to yourself to start up or install Steam and get cracking. It's incredible.

I'm listening to the soundtrack, and it appears that there was some sort of recording error in the song "Party Escort." Turn up the volume and go to 2:25. You'll hear it, plain as day: the Microsoft Outlook new mail notification sound? WTF?

Also, I found a pretty trivial bug in MacOS, maybe it will be fixed in Leopard? Damn, guess I'll have to get a copy of it to find out! :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I also happen to enjoy Portal soundtrack and to have found the glitch you described. In fact, I googled here in order to find out if someone else has noticed it as well.

It definitely sounds like the standard Windows "incoming mail" sound. It doesn't match the rest of the track, so it has very probably gotten there by accident.

My guess is that the composer made the final recording of the track by capturing sound output of the "application for composing" not aware that other sounds (mail client) made it into the recording as well. I have tried it once and it is certainly possible to capture Windows Mixer output like this.

The question remains, why did the composer rendered his work like this? It certainly doesn't seem to be very professional approach.

Then again, it may have gotten there by some other obscure way, unless it is an easer egg of some sort.