Let’s say you muted your machine, and you don’t hear your startup sound, you know you aren’t ready to listen to stuff. The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine. Volume control in a Windows machine is a wild west. You won’t need to wait for your machine to startup, he says.Ģ. You can turn on your Vista machine, go eat some cereal, while your machine is cold booting and then this gentle sound will come out telling you that you can log in. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react. A spiritual side of the branding experience.

It boils down to two sides of the coin.ġ. “Why the hell would you want to do this in the first place?” he told me is a common question. However, the plan might change and Steve Ball is reading all the feedback, both on blogs, and in the newsgroups for beta testers, and his team is considering all of this stuff and still has not made final decisions (although they’ve spent a lot of time already arguing this stuff out and are heading down a path of making this a non-customizeable sound that can’t be turned off, just like the Xbox has today). This will be a non-customizeable sound, and that’s been part of the plan for Windows Vista for many months, he said. You can do other things with your attention and your eyes during cold boot without feeling like you have to watch and wait. This is the plan of record for quite a few months. The current plan, he tells me, is that there will be a pre-wired sound that plays when the system is ready for you to logon. “The bottom line is that the rumors, stories, speculation about the new Windows Vista sound are true,” Ball said, “but with a number of extreme qualifications.” I could go more into it (I think what they are trying to do will be apparent in the shipping release, but isn’t quite there yet - even the new sound isn’t in current builds).Īnyway, let’s go into what Steve just told me on the record: The idea here (to both paraphrase Steve, and pass along the goals here that I learned) is that Windows Vista should present a common, and beautiful, face to the world.

I’m on the phone with Steve Ball, group program manager for the Windows Audio Video Excellence team (basically, the team that builds the stuff that plays audio and video in Windows).įirst, a disclaimer, before I left Microsoft, I got an intimate view of the process that Microsoft is going through in finding the startup sound (famous guitarist Robert Fripp was working on it).

Custom windows startup sound