In general, the chime upon startup of my Macbook Pro is welcome. However, there are those times that I’d rather much rather boot up in silence, such as a meeting or other relatively quiet event. I’ve found myself in that situation more times that one would expect and needed a way to work around this. Applescript is one approach.

What follows are two short applescripts, one to mute the volume on shutdown/restart, and one to reset the volume at bootup. I run the first script when I want to shutdown my machine (in place of using the system menus to accomplish the same).

Click here to paste the code below into the Mac Script Editor

tell application "Finder"
  display dialog "What would you like to do?" buttons
      {"Shutdown", "Restart", "Cancel"}
      default button "Shutdown" with icon caution
  if button returned of result is "Shutdown" then
    set volume 0
    shut down
  else if button returned of result is "Restart" then
    set volume 0
    restart
  end if
end tell

I saved the code as an application with the name ShutdownScript, and set the Run Only option. I then placed this application in the Dock. When run, the dialog below is shown:

The code to set the volume at boot time is all of one line:

set volume 5

As before, I saved this as an application and this time I added it to the login items so it is run whenever I boot my system.

You can also change the icon that appears by replacing to caution to either note or stop. The results are shown below:

With these short scripts, you can now boot up in silence.