One thing i really dislike in Mac OS X is the non-existing sound handling. While other operating systems offer an easy interface to configure individual sounds for specific events Apple seems to ignore this topic completely.

The following article explains an easy solution how to mute your trash (remove the trash sound in Mac OS Leopard).

Sound Handling

Before we are getting wild in terminal a short comparison between Mac OS Leopard and Windows XP

Mac OS X

If you want to mess with sounds in Mac OS X you have to start in System Preferences.app

So lets take a look into the sound PrefPane

hell yeah … that’s everything Apple offers us …. Shame on you. So lets check what the Redmond dudes do regarding the sound.

Windows XP

The Windows XP images are localized in german (a topic which Apple handles much better then Microsoft) – unfortunately i don’t have an english Windows XP around – but i guess my main point comes out anyways.

Lots of options – Thanks to Redmond. I could solve the initial Task (muting the trash) with about 5 mouse-clicks.

Conclusion

Simple as pie …. Apple fails horrible with Leopard which was released in 2007 in comparison to Windows XP which was released 6 years before (2001).

Mute Trash in Mac OS X

Now let’s focus on the main task of this post – muting the trash sound – which is pretty annoying from my point of view.

Locate the sounds files

As Apple does NOT provide any interface for that task we have to mess around with system files.

Therefore we need to know where the trash sound is located:

/System/Library/Components/CoreAudio.component

Now select that file and do a right-click, which should end in the following dialog

After selecting Show Package Contents a new Finder windows should appear. Inside that package navigate to

/System/Library/Components/Coreaudio.component/contents/Resources/SystemSounds/finder

There you should have the following two files

empty trash.aif

and

move to trash.aif

Yes – that’s the two bloody bastard sounds.

Idea

The idea is simple:

We just remove those files and keep a copy as a backup.

Now we have 2 options to solve the task

• GUI based -> Finder
• Terminal based -> Terminal

Finder

Duplicate empty trash.aif & move to trash.aif and then delete the original files.

As result you should see something like that

Edit: Adding a prefix into the filenames might be better then adding a suffix

Terminal

From my point f view – Terminal is the way to go. If you are used to it its even faster then the GUI-based approach. In general we just need to rename (using the move command mv) the sound files and we are done

The following image shows the rename’ing of empty trash.aif to OFFempty trash.aif

That’s it

Resume

Removing system files is far away from perfect but right now the only REAL solution i know – thanks to Ice|House for pointing our this idea at all.

This could result in problems if an Apple Update would come with a new version of CoreAudio.component. In that case just re-do the steps described above.

Some users might prefer Bleep Blop! which can be used to customize all your OS X sounds through an interface but i didn’t like that idea and the interface at all to be honest.

Let’s hope Apple reworks this 90-year-style sound interface in Snow Leopard – but i bet they don’t.

Tags: 10.5, CoreAudio, CoreAudio.component, empty trash.aif, move to trash.aif, system preferences, trash