OSXFAQ Reader Tips 

Auto mute the boot-up sound in Mac OS X

OSXFAQ Reader Tip By Robert Cailliau

is indeed interesting, because many of us would like their Macs to start in silence, especially laptops in busy places. Especially embarrassing if you have to restart your Mac in front of an audience.

For years I have used two simple applescripts, one run at startup, one at shutdown. Unfortunately, OS X no longer has (or does not yet have) shutdown/logout items. So here is my current solution:

1) write an applescript:

set volume 3

make it a run-only application, save it in your applications, add it to your login items. Now whenever you start up or log in, the volume will be set to 3 (you can choose any value between 0 and 7)

2) write an applescript:

tell application "Finder"
display dialog "Shut down the computer now?" buttons {"No",
"Yes"} default button "Yes"
if the button returned of the result is "Yes" then
set volume 0
shut down
end if
end tell

Make it a run-only application, save it in your applications, then add it to the dock.

Now to shut down, click this application and click its "Yes" button. The volume will be set to 0 before shutdown, therefore there will be no loud sound on startup. Yet after startup the first applescript will run and set the volume back to your desired level.

As soon as we get logout items in OS X it will be simpler and much more automatic since you can then just add a script "set volume 0" to the logout items.

Even better would be of course a system preference to set the startup sound.

Enjoy :-)

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