4/30/2023 0 Comments Mac power chime![]() It’s not like they have’t received any complaints about it. It’s baffling that after all these years of discontent and suffering, Apple hasn’t deigned to at least put a checkbox in the System Preferences to optionally suppress this horrible "feature". The second result is titled, "Mute, Disable or Quiet the Mac Startup Sound/Bong/Chime". Tellingly, the number one result for "mac startup chime" is a page that tells you how to "Silence Your Mac’s Start-up Chime Volume". A Google search for "turn off mac startup sound" yields just under a million results at the time of writing. I objected to it, because that sound had no "power". Some of them were weak, such as the Stanley Jordon guitar strum used on the first PowerMacs. ROM engineers continued changing it with each new machine. I wanted it to sound more like a "palette cleanser". I wanted to avoid a sound that would be associated with the crash. Turning the Mac on is one thing, but being forced to reboot from a crash is a totally different experience. I wanted something really fat, heavy bass, high notes, and a sharp attack. Unsurprisingly, he was after a "powerful" sound: While the sound is often misattributed to Brian Eno - perhaps due to confusion arising from the fact that he created the Windows 95 startup sound - it was in fact made by Jim Reekes and you can read about some of his thought processes here. This Wikipedia page tells the story of the chime, while this page tells some of the pre-history of how things were before the chime, back when Macs used to beep. Perhaps if it were quiet enough - very quiet - it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but given that it usually accompanies an involuntary reboot, this unwanted slap in the side of the head with the aural equivalent of a 40-pound cod is almost always unwelcome. Why anyone at Apple ever thought this was a good idea is beyond me. (As an aside, here is another compilation which includes not only the startup sounds, but also the "Chime of Death" played when certain failure conditions are detected.) Unless it makes your windows rattle in their panes, you’re not listening to it loud enough, and need to pump up the volume and try again. To fully experience it, enclose yourself in a quiet room, pump your speakers up to maximum volume and watch either this or this YouTube compilation of Mac startup sounds. ![]() I love it.It has always puzzled me how Apple - generally so hip, so chic, so elegant, so tasteful, so concerned with aesthetics - could have perpetrated such a horrible transgression against good taste, peace, and tranquility, as they have with their Mac startup sounds.Īt least as long as I’ve had a Mac (and if I recall correctly my first was a PowerMac 7600 back around 1996), the startup sound has been an absolutely stupefying, eardrum-shattering aural sledgehammer. This is an insane amount of work for something that doesn’t really matter in the end. And of course, this post wouldn’t be complete without also sharing the code for the utility I created to inject the new chime into the firmware update file. I thought it would be fun to take everyone along for a ride and show exactly what was involved in changing the sound. I went to work looking at the update contents to see if I could figure out how to modify the chime the same way I did with my Power Mac G3. He sent me Apple’s last firmware update for this model: iMac Firmware Update 4.1.9. ![]() By the way, Aidan’s iMac is special because it has a PowerPC G4 processor soldered onto the logic board instead of the original G3. ![]() As you can guess from the name, it has a slot-loading CD-ROM drive unlike the original iMac that had a laptop-style tray-loading drive. This particular iMac is officially known as the “ iMac (Slot Loading)” and has a model identifier of PowerMac2,1. Recently, Aidan Halpin, a reader of this site, asked me if I could do the same kind of startup sound customization on his iMac. I had to reverse-engineer just enough of Apple’s firmware update script to understand what was going on. That was a fun introduction to the Forth programming language. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might remember back in 2012 when I changed the startup sound on my Power Mac G3 (Blue and White). ![]()
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