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.
Ed Bott 
“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!
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.
Sounds most be able to be turned completely off in system to suite a silent startup environment, classroom, bedroom etc.
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?
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?
Does anyone know which DLL file contains that sound?
Scott Kingery wrote:
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? 😉
Jack, if you can find a notebook that reliably restarts from Hibernation in Vista, let me know what it is. The pitiful performance of sleep/hibernate features in current betas doesn’t inspire confidence.
And I honestly don’t know whether the sound will play when recovering from hibernation. As it stands, Microsoft wants the cool Fripp sound to be a last-minute surprise, so we don’t get to hear it or test it.
definitely a legitmate issue, because it goes to the core of who Vista (or any OS) is really for. Its all well and good that MS’s marketing group thinks its cool that everyone will hear their Fripp startup sound, revealing the user is booting up with Windows Vista. Its another thing if they are forcing us to hear it each time, whether we want to hear it or not. And of COURSE we can turn off our “external speakers” if we don’t want to hear it, but thats not really a viable option with a notebook, nor is always having to remember to mute the internal speakers before shutting down our notebooks.
Let’s delay the Vista release even longer trying to make yet another group of vocal people happy.
One simple “make it configurable” type switch often leads to many many hours of meetings, development, testing, etc, not to mention any longer term support costs that go with providing a new “setting”. All which take away from other projects and fixing bugs, like maybe hibernation problems like Ed is experiencing.
If you want ultimate configurability, build and compile your own version of Linux. The vast majority of PC (and Mac) owners aren’t interested in that. They want and expect some basic personalization, but beyond that most people are quite content.
I leave the sound on my laptop off at all times. I turn it on only when I specifically need it, that way I can normally not worry about random sounds playing at inopportune times. I can’t believe others who are commonly in potentially sound-sensitive environments like myself don’t do the same.
If you’re laptop doesn’t provide that functionality for whatever reasons — sorry you own/use that laptop. You’ll need a new laptop to run Vista anyway … 🙂
“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.”
Well, you’ll just have to turn to use “Sleep” or “Hibernate” and not “Shut down” won’t you. On XP I’d go months at a time without doing a full boot. Since joining my domain I’ve done one reboot since installing vista and that was to prove that this boot sound nonsense is true.
As you said, Ed, it’s “not the logon sound that plays when you enter your credentials to access your account” and there is no “come back from hibernate or sleep sound”, or if there is it go muted with everything else.
The reason for the new sound is obvious, guys: on the average PC, Vista will likely take ten minutes or more to come up, and this way you’ll hear it under the shower.
I must say I’m baffled by all the knee-trembling you geeks get out of Vista – is this the second coming of the Lord?
🙂
As a user I have no desire to go near Vista anytime soon and I suspect I’m one of millions who feel the same way.
It’s taken me 5 years to get XP to run well on my 2 computers, with the aid of a bunch of essential third-party utilities and several hardware upgrades.
After pouring a lot of sweat and dough into it, XP now does everything I want, works fast and is stable. I’m not about to trade those features for a new look and a fancy new chime. I’ll let you guys spit the pips out of Vista, and there’ll be truckloads of those. Remember, it took MS 3 years (SP2) to make XP what it should’ve been in the first place.
Microsoft’s biggest problem will be to convince punters like me to upgrade to Vista. Years from now MS will treaten to withdraw support for XP and we will laugh. Did someone say Support? We’ll laugh some more.
I can now look forward to years of stable computing, unhindered by frequent humungeous updates from MS and all the wobblies that go with them, since MS will be too busy fixing Vista to fiddle with XP.
Briard
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Hehe, sorry, could not resist.
Want to disable that startup sound permanently?
Open registry editor and go to
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ServiceGroupOrder]
Look for “AudioGroup” and move it to the bottom of the list!
This little registry hack works great for me!
The startup sound can’t play because the “Windows Audio Service” isn’t started until every every other service has started.
“spiritual side of the branding experience”
That’s special Steve Ball! You’re an OxyMoron!
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.
It can be turned off. Go to System –> Administration –> Login Window, click the Accessibility tab, and uncheck the “Login screen ready” sound. Those instructions are for Edgy (6.10) but Dapper should work similarly.
I’d like to know the same fix for XP Pro. Can’t eliminate the sound which plays (simultaneously with any other sound which may be on in Control Panel) at startup. I can’t find the file – it isn’t in C\Windows\Media – so I assume it’s in the registry somewhere. Anyone know what to do?
one better point is that if you leave YOUR sound off, that means it is just your sound, your profile. not the system sound our that of every possible user, so in that it gets played every time. if MS decides to make it play every time , it will play every time. the only thing that will likely help will be the jack solution.
As to the comment ‘it is an all or nothing situation’, sorry after logging in I can choose to play ‘metallica’ i don’t have to, I too can choose to mute my system with a button that only works after start-up.
and yes please delay vista one more year (as if) to make it more customizable (even start-up screen) should never taken 18 months to get it in anyway. they had better taken that time to make a decent product, without stupid eye & ear candy. I just want a stable and preformant machine. And not have to spend most of my power on the OS. The OS should be as stable and less needed as possible all the rest should be tunable.
And no I’m not a linux nor mac user