Mac Superdrive Noise-B-Gone Update?
When skimming through my pending Mac OS X upgrades this morning I noticed one saying:
This update eliminates the noise made by the optical disk drive during system startup and wake from sleep on MacBook computers.
Wow. As long as I’ve been using a Mac, the sweep-sweep noise has been characteristical for a Mac startup sound, reminiscent of the floppy drive seek sound computers made when they still came with floppy drives (yes, dear children, I am that old).
I wonder what this was for in the first place. Maybe to find out reliably if there is a disc in the drive already? <crystal ball>Possibly, the operating system did not check again and just relied on the hardware status flag being set correctly on startup, and if it was wrong, evil things could happen?</crystal ball> And now, almost suddenly, the Mac engineers found out that it is unnecessary altogether? The wonders of Snow Leopard.
What comes next? Removing the gong on boot to avoid Mac-obsessed college kids from making fools of themselves during lectures? 
IIRC, if you mute the sound in Snow Leopard, there will be no “gong” when you boot.
When I’m at home, I’ll do that update immediately and check if it really works, can’t believe it yet.
Ehm. Actually, there’s a PreferencePane that is capable of muting your Mac during startup…
http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/index.en.html
At my previous employer, I’ve deployed that nice piece of software to ~50 Macs. Imagine how annoying it was for the co-workers when everyone arrived in the office between 7 am and 9 am and started their Mac…
Oh, and BTW: The fix is only for recent MacBook (Pro) models — my SuperDrive is still making that crunchy sound…
Is it bad that I really really really want to go home and try that out now? It’s been annoying me forever!
@One: The problem is that you forget to mute the sound before you shutdown your Mac or put it to sleep exactly THAT one single time where you should have. Like, before your lecture. Or when you open your Macbook late at night in a sleeping train coach. Or you “just want to check e-mails” at 5 am before going to the airport while your wife is still asleep…
That’s why I LOVE StartupSound.prefpane.
@Jean Pierre: Of course, this was just a quick built-in solution and I didn’t know there is a prefpane for that. Related to this is http://mutablecode.com/apps/breakaway . It’s worth trying.
Actually, I don’t need this “gong” at all. It’s like a screaming “Hey all, look over here, it’s a Mac! This guy is a Mac user! Isn’t he cool?”
Breakaway does look interesting. Though, fwiw, iTunes does pause already when you unplug your headphone.