Mac OS: Mute sound on startup
Often surprised when your Mac is turned on in the train, in a meeting, in class ... The sound at startup can sometimes be disturbing, especially if the volume is left at maximum after having turned it off.
Depending on the Mac model, the methods for muting the startup sound may differ.
On some old Macs, it was enough to put a jack plug in the headphone socket.
On others, it was enough to mute or lower the sound before shutting down the Mac. No more sound the next time you start up .... simplistic right?
When the jack plug and other simplistic solutions no longer worked, the software "made for" appeared.
Apple has, then and each time, modified the behavior to prevent bypassing this sound at startup because its tone is informative of the hardware state of the computer.
For example an "airport" tone will indicate a problem with faulty RAM.
Apple believes, rightly or wrongly, that the startup sound is useful for users as well as for service providers. The non-diffusion of this sound is perceived as a starting anomaly.
The majority of software which makes it possible to intervene on this behavior modifies the very core of the system and is likely to be the source of big problems; they are a bit like the haxies of Unsanity.
Today, it is not possible to indicate a method. There are X methods, and the one that will work on one model will not work on another model.
Note that under OS X 10.9, (Mavericks), the Onyx utility included, among other things, the possibility of deactivating the startup sound, and that it works in my case. (iMac Intel Core 2 Duo running Mavericks]
Last minute :
On my iMac, under OS X 10.11, I managed to remove these are by typing a command in the Terminal (application present in Applications / Utilities):
- launch the Terminal
- paste this command
sudo nvram SystemAudioVolume=%80
- to validate
- give your password, (which will be typed without seeing what you are typing, it's normal)
- to validate
Note all the same, that it is not advisable to try to mute the startup sound of your Mac even if a late restart can have certain ... unpleasant consequences, if you wish to be informed of a possible hardware failure of the Mac.
