Yes, the Quadra is great, but not in all aspects. The speaker of the Quadra 900 is better suited for a hard rock concert than for a little workroom at late hours in the night. In order to avoid the startup blast, or at last, keep it in a civilized level, I wrote this little piece of code as soon as my wife heared that noise. It makes use of some new calls from IM VI (FindFolder, the FSSSpec stuff), as well as calls from the ancient IM kit (PRAM and shutdown manager).
As you know, in the new machines (Quadra 700, 900 and PowerBook 140, 170) the startup sound level depends on the level you set in the control panel "Sound" (so, its stored in the Parameter RAM). Nobody knows why, but when you put the level to 0, the startup sound seems to be at 6. So, the only thing you can do is set the vol to 1.
Drop the program in your "Startup Items" folder. Each time it´s invoked it installs a shutdown procedure that, at shutdown time:
1) gets the volume level
2) saves it in the "NoSound.prefs" file in "Preferences" folder and
3) set the volume level to 1
In addition, it reads the volume level saved and restore it.
In two words: it downs the sound level at shutdown time and set it back to its original level at startup time, once the startup sound is executed.
Feel free to use and distribute it. But remember that each Mac is a world. I only tested it in a reduced number of machines. I can assure that´s working in my Quadras, both at home and in office since its inception, without any known disruption or any harmful side effect. In addition other people is using it and they still talk to me.
Faustino Forcén
System Software Specialist
Apple Computer Spain
Faustino Forcén is just the standard kind of programmer. That is, he works until very late, sometimes is very ugly and usually his table is full of papers (without any order, of course). With this pedigree is really strange that he is happily married and father of a beautiful daughter of three months old.
A self learning person, his code is sometimes nasty and sometimes bizarre. The most disturbing is that it really works!!. Actually, in addition to programming until 5 a.m., he employs it’s spare time in being System Software Specialist for Apple Computer Spain. His three favourites hobbies, apart from the computer are comics, history and his family.
