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I have a Mac mini and for a long time I wondered how to mute the start-up chime without affecting the system sound at all. I found several options around the web to include terminal hacks that didn’t worked, plug-ins that were not as effective, and hundreds of opinions from several forum members that were not as accurate as what I found on my own.

Before telling you how easy my method is, let me explain to you what I came across while playing with the sound options on my Mac mini. Whenever you plug external speakers the audio profile for a connected item acquires a different profile from the internal speaker. This means that while you can mute the internal speaker, this doesn’t affect the external speakers.

To achieve this effect you have to unplug your speakers to set the internal speaker to whatever you want, then plug the speaker to set them at the desired sound level. This is how you can get rid of the start-up chime. Just mute your internal speaker and plug an external speaker to get all other sounds you want to play on your Mac.

No tricks, not hacks, no weird software installs, unfortunately I only have a Mac mini to test this. If you have an iMac, Mac pro or any apple notebook can you try this and post the results in the comments are of this post. Also, my Mac mini is an Intel machine, can anyone with PowerPC machines test this and reply back to me on our comments. Of course this option will not be too useful for someone with a Mac notebook, but if you are a desktop user I think it will do fine.

If you have more sound tricks for managing the sound in your Mac also let us know, if I get enough of this comments I might update my forums page to include all the ideas the community offer in one forum page. Keep in touch with me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter. Ciao.