**drumroll** please ...

Continuing in the fine tradition of Gnus leadership in multimedia News
and Mail, here is earcon.el & gnus-sound.el.  :-)

To use, put
(require 'earcons)
(add-hook 'gnus-article-display-hook 'gnus-earcon-display)
in your .gnus.

The sound files are available here
	ftp://ftp.miranova.com/pub/people/Steve.Baur/Gnus-Sounds.tar.gz

Install the sounds in gnus-5.2.29/etc/sounds

You have a choice between buttonizing earcons a la URL buttons, or
having them played when a message is displayed (controlled through the
earcon-auto-play variable).  To play a buttonized earcon, select them
the same way you select URLs.  The sound playing function is portable
to GNU Emacs, but you will need a .wav player to play all of the
sounds currently being used.  Perhaps Mark Boyns can fix this.  You
can customize the sound playing programs by modifying the appropriate
variables in gnus-sound.el.  If you don't have a showaudio script, use

#! /bin/sh
/bin/cat $* > /dev/audio


There are currently some dependencies on Gnus utility functions that
will need to be modularized out of Gnus to make this code usable with
W3, VM, etc.

Earcons are recognized in three pieces a prefix, a label, and a
suffix.  The prefix and suffix are currently set to `**'.  The label
determines which sound gets selected.

This is a plug-in to Gnus, so if it makes you **gag**, you can just
**flush** it away ...  :-)