SoundOn Fixes Volume Key & Sound Effects Lag!

[jeb1138]

Finally I found out why there was often a annoyingly long delay since 10.1.2 when using the volume key or waiting for a sound effect like emptying the trash, etc. It's because OS X turns your speakers off!! If you don't play any sounds for 30 seconds (so says the kbase article) your sound hardware goes into "low power mode" and it must be woken up.

The kbase article says that this is "to increase battery life", but lists all of the following as affected computers:
iBook (Dual USB)
iBook (Late 2001)
iBook (14.1 LCD)
PowerBook G4 (Gigabit Ethernet)
Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver 2002)
iMac (Flat Panel)

I guess by "battery life" they mean power, since Power Mac's & iMac's don't have batteries (except the clock) last time I checked.

Fortunately, some cool guy discovered this and created SoundOn (freeware) which just plays a mute sound every ten seconds to prevent the sound hardware from entering low power mode. Supposedly this will hurt battery life, but I haven't noticed a difference on my TiBook yet, and the elimination of that annoying lag is awesome!

Here's where to get it:
http://www.ziksw.com/soundon/

Here's the Apple KBase document:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106766

[slur]

Excellent! I always wondered why my G4's external speakers would occasionally "pop" before playing an alert sound as if they were just coming on. They were!

[jove]

And to think I spent over an hour with Apple support reseting this and that to "fix" the problem. I even talked to a specialist. Nobody knew! This delay makes watching and editing video and rowal pain in the a$$.

Thank You

[jeb1138]

Looking on VersionTracker to leave a positive comment for the software I saw that there's another app that does the same thing, but with more options, which has been around even longer. It's at:
http://mrfeinberg.com/KeepSoundAwake/

It's a lot smaller (150k instead of 1MB). Havnen't tried it yet.

[jeb1138]

Here's what KeepSoundAwake let's you do: (what a feature set! )