Standing At the Future Intersection of Smart and Television

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a bleeding edge hi-fi, home entertainment kinda guy.  In fact, the only TV that has ever made me say “Ooooh” is a 60” flatscreen. I own a 27” Quasar television that interfaces with an early '80's solid state Silvania pop top VCR and an Xbox, which doubles as a DVD player.

A few months ago, I was half-watching, half-listening to a football game on a nameless TV network (yes, futbol americano) while attempting to fix a furnace inducer motor that had seized up earlier in the week. Brrr. To tell you the truth, the unfixable furnace motor proved to be less annoying than a little sound I kept hearing from my TV set.  The sound was something you might expect to hear upon pressing a HELP button at the concierge desk in a boutique hotel for french poodles.  I imagine that 1.2 million football fans squirm when they hear that noise, which apparently signals the appearance of game-related metadata on the screen.  I found this particular noise to be so annoying that I've resolved to make it my default wake up beacon.  The next time I hear it, I will copy the sound to digital media, obtain explicit approval from the National Football League to upload it to my computer for my personal use, write a script that loops through it over and over and over again, route a speaker from my computer to my bed, and configure the script to run every morning as a Scheduled Task.  Seriously, the sound is that annoying.

So I started thinking, 'What if I could swap out the French Poodle Concierge ring-a-ding sound for something less annoying, like a Washington Husky bark, a Washington State Cougar growl, a Seattle Seahawk screetch or the characteristic axe chop of a University of Puget Sound Logger?  Wouldn't that would be swell?

So here’s my question: Does Windows Multimedia Edition allow you to replace standard TV alert sounds with a a sound of your own choosing? You know, like Windows? If not, it should. Food for thought. Feature creep for fun.

And btw, for all you TiVo fans out there.  I'll buy a TiVo when either Hell freezes over or it becomes possible to *legally* record TV shows sans commercials.