One. Ding. Only.
June 14, 2010 11:14 AM   Subscribe

Ding! Who said that? I'm looking for a Windows (XP) utility that logs which apps send sounds to the speaker, so I can tell where random little dings and stuff come from.
posted by Myself to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: This is, it turns out, Really Very Hard to do.

Tried to write a program to do it, even. Best I can figure, the only way to make it happen is to: 1 - write a sound-driver to intercept all the things that play sounds through the high-level APIs; and 2 - write an interrupt handler to intercept the things that try to beep the motherboard beeper, which goes through an entirely different code path.

Don't want to discourage you, and I really hope I'm wrong, but my research (a few months ago) was very discouraging.
posted by DaveP at 12:36 PM on June 14, 2010


I think you could also accomplish this without writing a driver by using code injection and then wrapping all of the sound APIs, but yeah it's still a lot of work and a lot of trouble.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:43 PM on June 14, 2010


Oh and if you're talking about apps that play by the rules and install entries in the system sound scheme (as opposed to those that just blindly output sounds) then there's already a list of all sounds broken down by program in the control panel sound applet, and you can mute them all at once from there.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:46 PM on June 14, 2010


Response by poster: DaveP, thank you for your sanity-preserving words. I thought I must've been the Worst Googler Ever for not being able to find the presumed plethora of preexisting programs to solve precisely this problem.

Stuff like this is what keeps me out of programming. All the easy stuff has been done, and all the stuff I want to do is not exactly newbie-friendly. I'd rather amuse myself other ways and let the graybeards tear their hair out. ;)

Rhomboid, you'd laugh if I saw what I did a couple years ago: Recorded my voice saying things like "Close Program" and "Default Beep", a different little snippet for every assignable sound in Control Panel, and then assigned them all, one-to-one. Made it really easy to figure out what was being indicated, but not by whom. It was the world's most humorless sound scheme, which actually made it pretty hilarious.
posted by Myself at 3:21 PM on June 14, 2010


Nothing to contribute, just wanted to say I love you sound scheme.
posted by defcom1 at 10:23 PM on June 14, 2010


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