Mac OS Sound

Playing Alert Sounds Asynchronously

Previous versions of the Sound Manager would take over the computer while playing an alert sound, forcing the user to wait until the sound was done playing before continuing. Sound Manager 3.1 removed this limitation by playing alert sounds asynchronously, so alert dialogs and other interface elements can continue processing while the alert sound is playing.

New sounds are queued within the same process and additional sounds from other processes are mixed together. This gives the user a perceived performance increase. You'll probably feel that the machine is running faster when a system alert sound doesn't lock up your computer anymore. You can disable this by setting the sysBeepSynchronous flag when calling SndSetSysBeepState .