Play Sound - 1.6.7

There is no need for this faceless application to be running continuously in the background, as the developer suggests, as long as you have DragThing. The application will launch when you drop the first sound file onto its icon and will stay open for ever in the background. However, if you have DragThing you can drag the file onto its alias in the DragThing dock and then you can easily quit it in DragThing after you're done with it.

I can't imagine this wasnt high on the list of anyone who used any Mac OS prior to X. Apple of course wants any sound file channeled through iTunes (and hence the iTunes store) this has brought some mch needed simple and fun functionality back to the Mac. Heres a fun tip: make a funny sound sippit (use quicktime or soundapp) then assign it to Play Sound, and drop it in a friends startup items in their account pref pane. Laughter ensues!

For the AppleScripter there is a treat: because Play Sound plays asynchronously, you can call a sound file immediately before a DLOG and the sound (verbal instructions, music, whatever) starts as the DLOG appears and plays while the DLOG is on screen. Often very, very useful.

Another opportunity to add another 5 stars to this superbly crafted app - with my thanks.

bobandris wrote:
I second that request for an option to configure it to play
the designated sound and then quit, automatically. One
example usage, would be as a startup sound player. You could
simply make it a 'User's Login Item'. Right now, I'm getting
a startup sound on an intel iMac by making the AIFF sound
file a login item. This auto loads iTunes and plays the
sound. But iTunes remains active in the dock, until you
'blow it up'.

Bob,

If iTunes is launching to play the sound, then Play Sound is actually not associated with that sound file, and is therefore not launching to play it. Instead, iTunes is playing it.

If you want Play Sound to play the sound, select the sound file in the Finder, then select File > Get Info from the Finder menu bar. An Info window appears. In the "Open With" section, set it to open with Play Sound. Then close the Info window. Now the sound file is associated with Play Sound, and will not open iTunes when you log in.

Play Sound uses 0.00% CPU and about 1.0 MB of RAM while idle in the background. Therefore leaving Play Sound running in the background when sounds are finished playing is not a big deal. In fact, it's actually less work for the system to leave it running than it would be to launch and quit Play Sound each time you play a sound.

While there truly is not much reason to have Play Sound automatically quit after playing a sound, I will keep this as a feature request, and will evaluate it for future releases.

would love for PlaySound to automatically quit running after the sound file has finished playing.