StartupSound: Put a Sock In Your Mac’s Chime

Posted by Steven Owens on 07/20/07 in Applications, Audio, Development, Home & Personal, Utilities

Volume Meter As usual, the library at my university is only ever crowded during finals week. One day when I was studying I decided to boot my Mac to check my email - a quite innocuous thing to do, as long as your volume is muted. Unfortunately for me, my volume was all the way up and the Mac startup sound rang throughout the silent library. Everyone turned to look and I was quite embarrassed.

If you would like to prevent situations similar to mine happening to you, Arcana Research has come to your aid with their StartupSound.prefPane. We have reviewed apps before that silence the startup chime, like Psst, but none of them have been quite like this one. This app, unlike other silencers, comes in the form of a prefPane instead of a daemon. Once the prefPane is installed, you can either choose to limit the volume or mute the startup sound completly.

StartupSound prefPane

I have had no problems with the prefPane, but since the program is in beta, the author recommends you backup important data before you install it. StartupSound.prefpane is freeware and is available from Arcana Research.

del.icio.us tag this | digg this | permalink | ping

10 Comment(s)

Legend:

Guest

Article Author

Contributor

Jordan Golson said on

July 20th, 2007 at 7:39 am

Wait a minute, I don’t understand.

What’s a startup chime?

I bought a Mac so I can put it to sleep. Always.

What’s with this turning it on and off thing?

-4

Stretch said on

July 20th, 2007 at 9:48 am

Jordan, I’m wondering the same thing. When I had my iBook, it was never shut down, unless it had to for software updates. I don’t understand the logic of shutting it down.

-2

Cat said on

July 20th, 2007 at 9:58 am

No need for a third-party app. Just hold down the mute button on the keyboard when you power up, and the startup chime will be silenced.

julian said on

July 20th, 2007 at 11:20 am

thx cat!

Fraser Drew said on

July 20th, 2007 at 12:37 pm

I do shut my MacBook down, just very occasionally!! However, i can see the point in this, as i do shut it down if its in my laptop case, probably just me worrying too much about it!!

steve said on

July 20th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

there is this little thing called the environment, there is also this thing called the electric bill

Jordan Golson said on

July 20th, 2007 at 3:29 pm

@steve

takes more power to restart than it does to leave it asleep.

And how much are you using your notebook that it raises your electric bill a noticeable amount?

-1

Steven Owens said on

July 20th, 2007 at 9:51 pm

@Jordan
I shut down because I don’t like the idea of the RAM being constantly powered…seems like it might make it fail more quickly. I guess I’m just paranoid.

Grant said on

July 22nd, 2007 at 11:04 am

@Jordan - Can you cite a source that shows powering up a computer actually takes more power than waking it from sleep? I have articles that refute your claim.

From: http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/technology/hardware/do_you_need_to_turn_off_your_pc_at_night.mspx

“However, here are some consumer “myths” that are worth addressing:

Turning your PC off uses more energy than leaving it on. Not true. The small surge of power you use when turning it on — which varies per PC make and model — is still much smaller than the amount you use in keeping it on for lengthy periods”.

Steve said on

March 6th, 2008 at 11:19 am

> No need for a third-party app. Just hold down the mute button on the keyboard when you power up, and the startup chime will be silenced.

I have never ever got this method to work. I’ve tried holding down F3 before pressing “on”, I’ve tried holding it down from immediately after that time, I’ve tried everything with F3 when booting up and it does nothing to the startup chime. I’m amazed that the macbook pro doesn’t have a simple silencer for this in their sound preference pane. Why wouldn’t they want it to be optional - however great they think it is?