Martin Peck
Martin Peck I write code, and manage people who write code.

Stop Skype for Business (on MacOS) from Playing a Login Sound

If you’re in a meeting, and you open your laptop, the last thing you want is a bunch of start-up sounds playing and drawing attention to you. That’s exactly what happens whenever I open Skype for Business (s4b) on my MacBook.

For some reason, the option to “not play sounds when you start up” is missing from the MacOS version of s4b, and there’s been a UserVoice request for this open for a while now (please go and vote on it!)

For now, I’ve come up with a workaround. First, here’s the health warning:

  • What I’m about to describe here is not supported, or even recommended.
  • This work around might cause other problems now, or in the future
  • This work around might not work on your machine (it works on mine, and that’s all the testing I’ve done)
  • Your files and folder names may differ from mine.
  • You will need admin access to your machine do to this
  • In fact, I encourage you not to do any of this. Seriously… stop reading, vote on the UserVoice ticket, and put up with the annoying noise!

Here’s what I did…

  1. Opened Finder and pressed Cmd+Shift+G and navigate to /Applications/Skype for Business.app/Contents/Resources/sounds/. This is where the sound files used by s4b live on my MacBook Pro.
  2. I discovered that if you delete these files, s4b will crash on startup (of course) so I first duplicated SFB_Login_01.m4a (just in case I needed it back) and then opened the original SFB_Login_01.m4a in QuickTime Player
  3. I used the Edit | Trim... menu in QuickTime Player to edit the sound file and trimmed it down to the last few ms of “silence”
  4. I saved this file, and launched s4b…

SILENCE! YAY!

Unfortunate UPDATE

So, it turns out that security updates and upgrades mean that this sound file returns, and this “hack” doesn’t last. I’m sure that there are ways you could patch this file automatically but I’ve found a much more satisfying solution to this problem…

Uninstall Skype for Business!

Luckily, my company has moved pretty much entirely to Microsoft Teams, and Skype has been all but phased out now, so I no longer have to put up with this massively annoying noise!