Classic Mac sounds on my mobile phone

We watched WALL-E the other day. A bit of trivia for Apple Mac fans (if you didn’t already know) is that WALL-E’s startup sound — heard when he’s finished his solar recharge — is that of a post-1997 Mac computer (with Steve Jobs on the board of Pixar and Disney, WALL-E was never going to make The Microsoft Sound (: ). Coincidentally, at around the same time as I saw WALL-E I was going through that modern malaise of mobile-phone-alert-tone-taedium… So, inspired by this bit of cinematic crossover coolness, I decided to get some Mac-chime action for my handset.

The first thing was obviously to get hold of the audio file. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, thanks to Google pointing me to a piece of software called MacTracker. MacTracker is actually a reference guide for Apple products (computers all the way back to the Macintosh XL, the MessagePads, printers, displays, even iPods and mice), but part of the information it holds about the computers is their startup and death chimes.

There’s no option in MacTracker to export the audio files, but by opening the app package (“Show Package Contents” in Finder) it’s possible to navigate to where the chime sound files are stored. Then from Finder, all I had to do was zap the file to the phone via Bluetooth. On the phone, opening the Bluetooth message gave me an option to save the “music” file, which I did — this adds the file to the Music Player, but importantly makes it easily selectable in the configuration of the alert tones.

So now when I receive an SMS I hear the death chime of a Macintosh LC, and the startup sound of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh alerts me to incoming e-mail. I’m going to apply similar configuration to my desktops: on-and-off for the last ten years I’ve been using a Homer Simpson soundbite to advise incoming mail, and it’s a bit tired now…

Next task will be to replace the startup sound on my N810 with something a bit retro-Mac! 🙂