Here’s an update to last weeks article on muting your system chime using a Terminal command. It turns out that these commands (as well as the one I’ll be giving you now) may not work on every computer. I’ve found that no matter what I do I can’t get any of them to work on my 2009 27” iMac. They’ll also not work if you have speakers or headphones plugged into your Mac.
It’s an interesting thing that from what I can tell has to do with differing firmware for each machine. The startup chime does serve a purpose beyond just making noise. This chime tells you that the computer found no hardware problems at start up.
A fair number of people wrote in about just muting your system volume before you restart. This does work for most machines but the whole point of using the Terminal command was so you don’t have to remember to do that.
Here’s an alternate way to mute your volume:
Step 1: Open Terminal and type in nano. Then press enter. The nano editor will open.
Step 2: Type the following lines into the nano editor:
#!/bin/bash
osascript -e ‘set volume with output muted’
Step 3: Press control and O then type the following and press enter: ~/Documents/mute.sh
Step 4: Change the script in the nano window to the following:
#!/bin/bash
osascript -e ‘set volume without output muted’
Step 5: Press control and X, then press Y to agree and change the save name to and then press enter. Nano should quit: ~/Documents/unmute.sh
Step 6: Run the following commands in Terminal. If it asks for your password give it.
sudo chmod u+x ~/Documents/mute.sh
sudo chmod u+x ~/Documents/unmute.sh
sudo mv ~/Documents/mute.sh /Library/Scripts/
sudo mv ~/Documents/unmute.sh /Library/Scripts/
sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook /Library/Scripts/mute.sh
sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /Library/Scripts/unmute.sh
Step 7: Quit Terminal and reboot your machine.
This may or may not do it depending on your computer. There is a free application you can get called StartNinja (http://www.allvu.com/index.php/sndownloadpage.html) that will do much the same thing, without all the Terminal fun. The app doesn’t work on all machines, so those of us with iMacs may be out of luck.