Mac Startup Sound Too Loud? Disable or Lower It

You restart your Mac in a quiet office. The meeting room is silent. Then the startup chime plays, loud. Everyone looks at you. The chime is iconic, but it's easy to forget it's coming, and it's often louder than you'd like.

How to disable the startup sound

macOS lets you turn off the startup chime entirely:

1. Go to System Settings > Sound
2. Find "Play sound on startup"
3. Turn it off

Done. Your Mac will start silently from now on. No Terminal commands needed.

Terminal method (if you prefer)

You can also disable it in Terminal:

sudo nvram StartupMute=%01

To turn it back on:

sudo nvram StartupMute=%00

Can you lower the startup sound instead of disabling it?

Not with a dedicated setting. There is no separate slider for the chime. Its loudness generally follows the output volume your Mac was set to when it shut down: shut down at a high volume and the chime is loud, shut down at a low volume and it's quieter.

Workaround: before restarting, lower the system volume to a low level. The chime will play quieter. It requires remembering, but it works if you want to keep the chime rather than silence it.

The broader Mac sound control problem

The startup chime is just one example of how little audio control macOS gives you. Alert sounds, notification sounds from apps and media all sit under one main volume slider. If you keep adjusting the volume to manage different sources through the day, per-app volume control solves the broader problem.

SoundDial gives every running app its own volume slider and mute button in the menu bar. Set a chatty app low, music at a comfortable level and calls at full volume, each one on its own. It can also boost a quiet app above 100%, up to 200%. Note that it works on apps while they're running, so it doesn't control the startup chime itself; use the setting above for that.

More about SoundDial, a per-app volume mixer for Mac.

SoundDial is a €14.99 one-time purchase on the Mac App Store, no subscription, and needs macOS 14.2 or later. Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store.