Usually, you don’t pay a moment’s notice to the harmonic chime that plays when you boot up your Mac. It’s there for a reason, to let you know all is right with your beloved computer. But there are times when you would really like to be able to silence it. Well, believe it or not, there’s more than one way to silence a chime.
Solution #1: Mute Your Mac
This is the easiest way to silence the startup chime. All you need to do is mute your Mac. Just press the F10 key on your keyboard and the next time your Mac boots up, or reboots, it will remember that it was muted, and won’t play the chime.
The only drawback about this solution is that you have to remember to mute you Mac before rebooting.
Solution #2: Via the Command Line in Terminal
You can completely disable the chime, there is a command line you can enter while in Terminal that will silence the chime until you turn it back on again.
Just open up the Terminal application, you can find it in “Applications” -> “Terminal,” and enter the following on the command line:
sudo nvram SystemAudioVolume=%80
You’ll need to enter the Administrator password when you enter this command.
If you decide you’d like to reenable the system chime, simply enter the following on the command line:
sudo nvram -d SystemAudioVolume
Again, you’ll need to enter the Administrator password to execute this command.
Solution #3: Use an App
If you don’t want to have to remember to mute your Mac via the keyboard approach, and you don’t feel comfortable entering command into the Terminal app, there’s another way. Luckily, some very nice programmers have created free apps that mute your Mac.
One such free app is called, StartNinja. This app works on OS X Lion and higher, and lets you toggle the startup chime ON and OFF as needed.
StartNinja can be downloaded from the StartNinja download page. [DIRECT LINK]
If you need to mute your Mac’s startup chime, any of the three methods above should do the job for you.
Thanks to OS X Daily for the original tip.
