Silent Start For Mac

Frightened cats, scared dogs, and startled infants everywhere around you are usually a sign of sudden and loud noises blasting from heavy machinery ... or from your Mac.

The main reason behind your Mac's capability of sending anyone around you scurrying away in fear is the startup chime, a simple but quite loud sound designed to let the user know that the Mac has passed all diagnostic tests successfully.

The startup chime's volume uses the volume level you used before shutting down or rebooting your Mac, therefore if you used your computer to watch a movie or listen to your favorite music album at maximum volume level.

If you don't want to live in fear of being scared to death and you need to disable the startup sound completely, you can mute the system audio before rebooting your Mac or use a Terminal command to disable it permanently.

However, if you are not comfortable with the command line and you don't fancy always remembering to mute the audio before restarting your computer, you can give Silent Start a try.

Silent Start is an unobtrusive and easy to use macOS app which runs in the background and keeps an eye on your Mac's volume, muting it before rebooting the system and restoring it to the previous value after login.

Your Mac's startup sound can be toggled on and off using Silent Start's menulet, but it is important to mention that the app needs to be running on your Mac if you want to have the startup chime disabled. If you quit it before rebooting your computer, the startup chime will still be there, ready to startle your cat.

Silent Start can be set up to launch automatically on login and to notify you when it restored the volume level after the system start. Silent Start's Preferences window allows you to configure the app to alert you that your headphones are plugged in when powering off your Mac.

This is important because Silent Start will not be able to manage your Mac's internal speaker when headphones are plugged in, with the mention that this option will also add a dock icon as it is needed to allow the app to display the headphones notification.

If your cat likes to stay by your side while using you use your Mac or if you don't want to get thrown out of the library after starting up your computer, you need the Silent Start macOS application running in the background ready to mute your Mac's startup chime.