I’m not sure about this one. Could either be tied into the Windows sound event process or the audio driver’s limitations?

My name is Chris Proctor. I’ve never written before, but I have a feeling you might be able to answer a question I have concerning system sounds on Windows Vista. I know about your digital wisdom from TechTV (the only thing I really don’t like about G4TV is that they dropped all the TechTV stuff after they bought it), and have seen a few of your web videos, so I’m confident you can help in some way or another. Don’t worry, my question is relatively a very small issue.

OK, I’ll try to stop rambling and cut to the chase here. Basically, I can’t get Vista to play a few sounds in a custom sound theme I’ve made. See, what I’ve done is I’ve created a theme that consists of all custom sound effects, all video game sound effects to be exact (yeah, how dorky is that?). And, for the “grand finale” of this theme, I’ve built 2 custom sound clips. I’ve built a medley of short video game tunes for the start-up sound, and a similar medley for shutdown. The start-up medley runs about 1 minute 40 seconds, and the shutdown medley runs about 1 minute 55 seconds. Before I built these 2 sound clips, I had other sounds for start-up and shutdown which worked perfectly. The start-up tune was 12 or 13 seconds long, while the shutdown tune was about 6.

It’s my guess that Vista has some sort of time restraint for the sounds that I don’t know about. Do you know if there are? And, if there turns out to be no time restraint, do you have any idea why Vista suddenly doesn’t want to play these sounds when I ask it to? It’ll play all others in the theme just like it should, and the 2 big sound clips will play in Windows Media Player, WinAmp, and even when I press the play button in the sound theme dialog box. But, it just doesn’t want to play them at the times they’re instructed to. Any ideas?

I know this may seem like a trivial thing in the face of the horror that is Vista, but damn it, I built this from scratch and I just want it to work. It’s a little pet project that’s been black flagged on the last lap and I need a little help. I greatly appreciate any such help you can provide. Thanks for your time.

UPDATE: I was hoping someone from Microsoft would pick up on this issue and continue the discussion. Silly me forgot to ping Larry about it! No matter, he’s come up with quite a comprehensive report on why Windows shutdown sounds work the way they do…

• How to Record Anything through your Computer Speakers
• Windows Startup Sound Remixes

In between getting rickrolled by Ben Gold (ricktroll?), the chat roomer “hellkine” passed along a rather interesting remix. I’m getting to the point of fearing what will be on the other end of any YouTube URL, but this one turned out to be generally interesting. If you thought the Windows XP startup sound sounded anything but seriously spectacular, maybe you’re not really listening?

Rather, maybe you were waiting for a better interpretation of the theme? I’m almost tempted to extract the music from the following videos and save them as MP3s (for posterity).

Could you have done this any better?

“vbognot626″ (Vince) one-upped “hellkine” almost immediately thereafter with a link to this inspired interlude:

I wonder if either of those tunes were created on Windows?

• Windows Vista Sound Problems