How to identify mystery "click-clock" sound on MacBook Pro (OSX10.11.2)

January 8, 2016 1:08 PM

My 2011 15" MacBook Pro makes occasional "click-clock" sounds when I'm doing things. It sounds like the sound-effect of a radio button being changed or some other innocuous event, but it happens when I'm doing something else in another window (or even on another screen). It's not a sound I ever hear when I'm actually doing something that causes the sound. How can I figure out what it is?

I usually run a couple of VMWare virtual machines (one Linux, one Windows) and it often happens when I'm typing in a word processor in the Windows VM. But it doesn't happen all the time, and it's not only when I'm using Word under Windows.

I have a mild suspicion that (some?) keystrokes or mouse motions from a VM are getting copied to a different VM (or to the base OS) and causing something to happen, but I can't figure out what that something is. The sound is not something I recognize from any other normal use case.

If there was a way to turn on a debug log for a sound server, to print the process name or ID of a client that had queued up a sound sample, that would probably really help.

Any other debugging techniques I should try?

posted by spacewrench to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

It's not Skype is it? It plays a similar noise when someone comes online, and took me months to figure out what it was and disable it.
posted by derbs at 1:15 PM on January 8, 2016

Weird, I just had this happening last week. Mine was a really brief sound and it sometimes repeated every ~10s or so. I move my MBP around a lot and next time I noticed that the power adapter brick was right next to my speakers, so I moved it and I haven't heard the sound since. Still I'm not sure if that caused the sound because it was kind of different from what I'd expect in that case.
posted by circular at 1:23 PM on January 8, 2016

Is this a sound coming from the speakers or a sound the machine is making? If it’s from the machine dying mechanical hard drives make that sound. Backup.
posted by bongo_x at 1:28 PM on January 8, 2016

Response by poster: Hmmm, could be Skype. I leave it open, but rarely use it. It's definitely not mechanical (I've switched over to SSDs).

I just looked through Skype's audio preferences, and it might be the sound that was enabled for "Desktop API App Connected." Not sure what that means, but I'll change it to a more distinctive sound and see whether that's it.

Thanks!
posted by spacewrench at 1:32 PM on January 8, 2016

I had a catastrophic hard drive disaster that started with clicky noises. I didn't have a backup (the backup drive had coincidentally died a couple weeks previously) and needed the files badly, so I sent it off to DriveSavers, who reported after the (successful) recovery process that my platters looked like Swiss cheese. Apparently the clicky noises were caused by my hard drive getting punched full of holes over time.

So it wouldn't hurt to make sure you've got a backup.
posted by leahwrenn at 2:42 PM on January 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

A long shot, and I assume you would recognise the sound, but just in case - a forgotten CD/DVD in the CD/DVD drive?
posted by Stephanie_Says at 3:00 PM on January 8, 2016

My acrobat updater does that.
posted by PSB at 4:32 PM on January 8, 2016

is Windows running every time the sound comes on? IE used to have a click noise when you activated a hyperlink or otherwise loaded a page, and sometimes background processes would trigger it in my experience (I'm assuming because they used the IE engine to get stuff off the Internet). I recall the Java updater being the main culprit, as it'd pop up and be annoying pretty soon afterwards.
posted by mrg at 5:49 PM on January 8, 2016

iChat (or messages, or whatever it's called now) haunted me for months, because it plays a sound when a contact comes online or goes offline. I had to actually see a new name appear/disappear on my contact list to figure out what it was.

In my case, that sound, as it turns out, was an imitation of the sound of a door opening or closing. Now that I know that, it makes sense. But when I didn't know what it was, it just sounded like the random sound of something making contact with something else.

I was able to turn those sounds off in iChat preferences once I finally figured out what they were.

So check for IM programs you've got running, in addition to Skype. My Mac automatically opened iChat on booting until I told it not to.
posted by mudpuppie at 6:24 PM on January 8, 2016

I have the same issue on a 2012 mac mini - at first i thought it was mechanical (bc that's how it sounded), but then it came out of a bluetooth speaker I had connected. My suspicion is that it is something in the windows virtual machine I am running under parallels, possibly the reloading of a banner ad in chrome or in the torrent client I use.
posted by modernnomad at 6:38 PM on January 8, 2016

Is it a "locking" sound, a bit similar to when you lock an iPhone? If you have 1Password or another password management app, it could be accessing the Keychain. Here is a useful AskDifferent thread about how to diagnose the source of a strange sound.
posted by hgws at 11:38 PM on January 8, 2016

Are you sure it's not mechanical? Because my previous Mac (the same year and model as yours) made a sort of metallic knocking sound from time to time, more or less frequently depending on how and where I rested my right hand on the case or trackpad. Tightening all the screws on the underside of the Mac fixed it for me.
posted by ddbeck at 5:35 AM on January 9, 2016