A friend has a Windows XP SP3 machine that plays a harmonica sound for about 5 seconds throughout the day at what seems to be random intervals (every couple hours). My question is how can I find the program making this sound? Is there a Windows API hook for monitoring audio access? I've gone through and checked all the standard Windows sounds in the Control Panel and right now the theme is set to no sounds and I personally checked to make sure none of the events have a sound specified. I also checked the Task Scheduler to make sure there wasn't something scheduled to go off every couple hours. Any ideas on how to go about finding the bugger?
Windows – How to find the program making a harmonica sound
audiomonitoringprocesswindows xp
Related Solutions
Sounds to me like the Windows Search dog.
Do you have Windows Search (press Windows-Key and F) open? It makes the same noise - I think it's the dog panting.
You could verify this by opening Windows Search and (right-)clicking on the dog. Every time I do this I get a similar noise.
As for stopping it, assuming that it is the search-dog, you could try turning off the animated character using the right-click menu on the dog.
On Windows 7, if you click on the volume icon, there is a link to "Mixer" where you can mute individual applications. It should stop once you mute java.
Best Answer
We pulled a prank like this with the use of telnet access on Windows XP. If you issue some commands which don't draw window boxes (in your case presumably a command line VLC player or something) you'll only hear the sound. So go look for MP3/WAV/OGG files on your pc which resembles the sound you're experiencing, delete/rename/move it so the program playing it will crash/throw an error.