Remove audio logo from NVDA launcher

[SaschaCowley]

Link to issue number:

Closes #14068
Closes #15110

Summary of the issue:

The NVDA launcher currently plays an audio logo when launched.
This creates a number of problems:

• Playback of this file uses winmm, which is a deprecated API.
• Playback of this file may delay execution of the launcher, if it takes longer than unpacking the launcher does. (Use shorter startup sound for NVDA launcher #14068)
  • The NVDA audio logo is 10 seconds long, whereas it typically takes around 6 seconds for the launcher to start the temporary NVDA on my machine.
• Some users may want to silence playback of this sound altogether, which is currently not possible. (15110)

Description of user facing changes

The NVDA launcher is now silent until the temporary copy of NVDA it includes is started.

Description of development approach

Removed all code related to playing the audio logo from launcher/launcher.nsis.

Testing strategy:

Built the launcher and ran it from explorer.
Also ran NVDA from source patched to check for updates, and swapped the downloaded launcher for the one without the sound logo.

Known issues with pull request:

There is now an appreciable period of silence between NVDA quitting to perform an update, and the temporary NVDA speaking to read out the update progress.

Code Review Checklist:

• Documentation:
  • Change log entry
  • User Documentation
  • Developer / Technical Documentation
  • Context sensitive help for GUI changes
• Testing:
  • Unit tests
  • System (end to end) tests
  • Manual testing
• UX of all users considered:
  • Speech
  • Braille
  • Low Vision
  • Different web browsers
  • Localization in other languages / culture than English
• API is compatible with existing add-ons.
• Security precautions taken.

@coderabbitai summary

[cary-rowen]

There is now an appreciable period of silence between NVDA quitting to perform an update, and the temporary NVDA speaking to read out the update progress.

Can we improve this? Is it possible to use a shorter sound? In order to let users know that the update has started, rather than being stuck for some reason.

[seanbudd]

can we also delete that file from miscDeps in a separate PR?

[SaschaCowley]

Created nvaccess/nvda-misc-deps#35. Do we want to merge that and update the submodule on this branch?

[SaschaCowley]

@cary-rowen

There is now an appreciable period of silence between NVDA quitting to perform an update, and the temporary NVDA speaking to read out the update progress.

Can we improve this? Is it possible to use a shorter sound? In order to let users know that the update has started, rather than being stuck for some reason.

Unfortunately PlaySound and friends are the only easy ways of natively playing a sound file that I'm aware of, and they all use winmm. As we're running under NSIS, our options here are rather limited.