Joe Wilcox doesn’t understand the fuss over the Windows Vista startup sound:
I’m baffled by all the significant chatter over something as seemingly insignificant as the Windows Vista startup sound. For anyone that missed it, Microsoft plans to have Windows Vista emit a distinctive chime when the system is booted up and ready for login or use.
Microsoft’s Steve Ball gave Robert Scoble some reasons for the startup sound, which as of current planning cannot be turned off: 1) “A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react”; 2) “The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine.”
First, let’s be clear that we’re talking about the startup sound, the one that plays when your computer turns on, not the logon sound that plays when you enter your credentials to access your account. The problem is that the startup sound is not customizable. It’s hard-coded into a system DLL. OK fine, but a side effect of that is that the sound can’t be turned off. And that’s wrong, wrong, wrong. The user should always have the ability to turn this sound off. Here’s why:
Imagine you’re a reporter and you’ve just entered the briefing room for a major announcement from a politician. You open your notebook, and here comes the Windows startup sound, blasting away. You could get thrown out of the briefing room for that.
Or this scenario: You and your spouse are staying in a hotel and you have to get up early to do some work. You slip out of bed quietly, to avoid waking her up, turn on the computer and the sound comes blasting out. A bad way to start the day.
Or you’re a student and you sneak into class five minutes late. Do you really want your computer to announce your late arrival? For that matter, is the world a better place when that damn sound plays 20 times as 20 students turn on their computers at the start of class?
If Microsoft wants to create a mystical branding experience with Windows, fine. If a hardware maker wants to slap stickers all over a new computer, that’s fine too. Just give me the right to remove or change that sound, in the same way that I can remove those stickers.
“spiritual side of the branding experience”
Some things you just can’t make up.
I suspect that here in Europe the EU will take care of that: “Windows Vista N”. Which is of course our favorite OS without the evil dll file…
“Imagine you’re a reporter and you’ve just entered the briefing room for a major announcement from a politician. You open your notebook, and here comes the Windows startup sound, blasting away. You could get thrown out of the briefing room for that.”
It’s called the volume control knob/mute button/windows volume control panel/etc.
One of the first things I do on any new machine is enable the “No sounds” profile in Control Panel. All the blips, blops and bleeps are distracting and make me feel like I’m using a machine from a bad 1950′s Scifi movie.
And I don’t want to have to unmute my machine every time I want to listen to a song, play a game or watch a video. The startup bleep needs to go, bleepit!
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Evilkat, my notebook doesn’t have any of those things. It has the Fn key which you have to press in combination with the F8 key for Mute or the up arrow or down arrow for hardware volume control. I really hate startup sounds.
I have to say that this is a dumb decision and smacks or over analysis and design by committee.
1. Sounds most be able to be turned completely off in system to suite a silent startup environment, classroom, bedroom etc.
2. Branding? Fuck that, it’s MY computer,a nd should be able to make it play any dam noise I want at whatever point it’s firing. Who the fuck is MS to tell me what sound my computer needs to be making, it’s none of their dam business past providing a default. Because other companies don’t respect their uses control it’s ok for MS to do it too?
3. Please.Not broken DON’T fix it.
Yet MS often seems mystified by why people accuse them of cooperate arrogance and being out of touch. This is an excellent example of taking control away from the user for no good reason to create a bunch of soft sell points that nobody in their right mind cares a wit about.
Seriously what problem does making this mandatory or even hard to change fix? What a colossal wast of design time on a function set that nobody wants or asked for and way to fail to to empower the user or make control of their environment and property richer.
You user must be able to reasonable control all basic I/O on box they own.
The pre-login sound (as I call it) has to go. It’s in build 5472 and as soon as it started I began my Googling for a fix. Everyone thought I was crazy and told me to change the settings in my profile. I keep trying to tell everyone that it’s not based on profiles because it’s before it gets to that point! I disable startup and shutdown sounds on my laptop for precicely the reason you mention. And my meetings are no where near that high level.
Like you I have an older Compaq laptop and there IS NO volume knob,button etc. My solution is to keep the end an old, broken set of headphones plugged into the headphone jack. Works but lame.
Sidenote: I’m trying out Ubuntu 6.06 and it makes a pre-login sound as well. Much shorter than the Vista one. Haven’t looked into if that can be turned off.
I agree Ed completely…the control should be in the hands of the user…why is MS introducing new annoying stuff in Vista? Cant we coax them somehow to make them reconsider? Using your site or maybe your friends’ sites?
I do not see the problem.
You can always turn off the lodspeaker by default when youtr computer starts up.
Erik
Ed,
Not that I am pro startup Jingle, but for the times that it needs to be off, there are DEFINITELY ways of having it off. However I understand it’s not always the most convenient thing to do.
I seriously doubt MS will allow customization of the sound as some people have been clamoring for, if indeed MS wants to create a brand-sound. However, I agree that those of us who want it off should be allowed to turn it off.
But where does customization start and stop? For instance we shouldn’t be allowed to customize/turn on/off the Windows startup logo, because well, it’s a brand image. How is sound any different? Perhaps we should be drawing the lines of customizability around what’s intrusive and what’s not. But can we successfully argue that sound is more intrusive than images?
How is sound different? It’s ambient. The visual display of a logo or image on my screen is between me and Microsoft, but a sound that plays affects everyone within hearing range, which could be a whole lotta people. I think sound is inherently more intrusive than images, don’t you?
I guess, they learned this from Apple. That’s one of the little annoying aspects of a Mac (but I love my Powerbook anyway 8-))
@Ed
You’re right about the sound difference of course, but when I asked “how is sound any different”, I meant that in the context of “how is sound any different from a visual logo that is NOT allowed to be customized”.
Sound can easily be turned off and you can still successfully operate with your machine. On the other hand, you can’t operate the lappy with your monitor off. Sure, turning the monitor off is a more extreme form of controlling visuals, but hell, if you’re trying to use your laptop as silently as possible in order to NOT wake up your sleeping spouse or whatever, chances are you’re going to have your sound off anyway since you’re NOT going to be rocking to Metallica at that point.
The gripe I have with your secnario is that EVERY one of the scenarios that you presented is pretty much an all or nothing case. If you come 5 minutes late to class, you’re not going to be having mp3s playing on your laptop ANYWAY. You’d have your sound muted, because the last thing everyone in class wants to hear from a late arriver is that he has mail.
Frankly, if the start up jingle is the biggest issue Vista has, then hell I’ll be the first to buy the damned OS.
What happens if you use Windows Volume Control to mute the sound card before you shut down the computer? Will the sound still play?
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> The problem is that the startup sound is not customizable. It’s hard-coded into a system DLL. OK fine, but a side effect of that is that the sound can’t be turned off.
Does anyone know which DLL file contains that sound?
Scott Kingery wrote:
> The pre-login sound (as I call it) has to go. It’s in build 5472 and as soon as it started I began my Googling for a fix.
If an existing resource-editing program will work to modify Vista DLLs, then that sound could be extracted, analyzed, and either replaced with a silent file of the same format & length, or deleted entirely (depending on the editor, the DLL, and whether or not Vista is over-particular about altered system-file lengths &/or checksums).
But I think we all agree that users shouldn’t have to go to such lengths just to disable a “feature” of their OS.
Mark, I believe the new Vista sound will be stored in Authui.dll.
A lot of the problem with trying to analyze this issue now is that the final sound isn’t included in the current betas. The placeholder that’s in there is (I believe) the XP Windows Start sound, which is long and obnoxious.
Hm, I can’t remember when I last went into a meeting or lecture and *booted* my ThinkPad. In fact, it usually only gets a restart after a Windows Update. Does this mean the Vista start-up sound will play on waking from hibernation or does Ed not know of any portable PCs that hibernate?