How To Change Windows 10 Shutdown Sound
Kenneth Calimlim
Think twice about messing around with the registry. Unless you are an advanced techie, tweaking the registry could be risky business. Besides, there is no guarantee that the shutdown sound tweak will work. Instead, buy a small, inexpensive USB-powered cooling fan and connect it to one of the USB Ports, preferably a front panel port, on your computer. This way, when you initiate a shutdown, the fan will stop spinning, and you will be able to tell for sure that your computer has powered off successfully. Simple and reliable.
Think twice about messing around with the registry. Unless you are an advanced techie, tweaking the registry could be risky business. Besides, there is no guarantee that the shutdown sound tweak will work. Instead, buy a small, inexpensive USB-powered cooling fan and connect it to one of the USB Ports, preferably a front panel port, on your computer. This way, when you initiate a shutdown, the fan will stop spinning, and you will be able to tell for sure that your computer has powered off successfully. Simple and reliable.
Older Windows versions were able to play a startup sound, a separate logon sound. A sound could also play when Windows logs off or when it shuts down. The user could assign all these sounds from Control Panel -> Sound. Starting with Windows 8, sounds for these events have been eliminated almost entirely. Let's see how to play the shutdown sound in Windows 10.
In Windows 10, Microsoft focused on making Windows boot and shut down faster. Developers of the OS had completely removed the sounds which play at logon, log off and shutdown. Even if you assign sounds to the events for 'Exit Windows', 'Windows Logon' and 'Windows Logoff' or try to restore these events using the Registry, they will not play. There is the official statement from Microsoft which explains the situation.
However moving the shutdown sound this late started running into other problems. The code we use to play the sound (the PlaySound API) needs to read from the registry (to see what the preferences for this sound were) and from the disk (to read the .wav file), and we ran into issues where the sound was unable to play (or got cutoff halfway) because we had shut down the registry or the disk already! We could have spent time rewriting the API but we decided the safest and most performant thing to do was to eliminate the sound altogether."
Additionally, Windows 10 comes with a fast startup/hybrid boot feature. Due to this feature, when you click Shut down, it logs you out and hibernates the kernel and powers off; it doesn't really exit Windows. When you turn on your Windows 10 device again, it resumes from hibernate and logs in again. This is different from booting after a full shut down.
Task Scheduler is able to run tasks attached to any event, so specifying our script as the task's action will make it play the sound every time you shut down the OS. To play the sound, we have to use PowerShell.
In the comments, please tell if this method works for you or not. Please specify which Windows 10 version and build number you are running, and if you have the Fast Startup feature disabled or enabled.
Windows 8.1 at least is so quick to logoff that it gives no time to play the shutdown sound or logoff sound. Maybe if there was a task or service created that delayed shutdown for 3-4 seconds until the sound played and then quickly exited, the sound will reliably play every time.
By the gods almighty! This app is legendary. It does work as you described and just with a little bit of fiddling with Log off sound and Exit sound. For me the timing was better with putting system shutdown sound as log off sound, then it sounded natural and leaving exit windows sound blank aka (None). Thanks for the app. Its a bliss hearing startup and shutdown sounds again!
A little bit temperamental but otherwise it still works every now and then. The log on sound is guaranteed which is epic because now my new laptop logs on to beginning part of Receive You from Yakuza 0 when Kiryu and Majima meet for the first time !!
@Sergey Tkachenko
Thanks for the detailed article, did the trick.
Also got a question. Although shutdown would provide enough time to play the entire sound, it is somehow cut after a second or so. Is there a way I could specify a minimum duration (to match to duration of the sound) the task should run without being interrupted and shutdown?
Thank you
I tried this on both my custom Main PC and my Alienware M17 Laptop. Everything worked except for the Shutdown Task on my Laptop. I tried disabling and re-enabling the Fast Startup, but nothing works. Is there a way to delay the shutdown process in order for the sound to play?
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I'm on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS with GNOME Desktop. I was wondering if you can have a custom sound play (the default one is nice, but I'd rather have a custom one) when you log into Ubuntu, as well as when you log out.
I've gotten a nostalgia rush from when I used to use Windows XP in 2008-ish on a Dell Optiflex with the Royale Noir theme for log on and the Windows Vista Beta 2 for logout, and genuinely want to know if you can do this.
I see in one of your comments that you're not too keen on using the terminal, but this here link has all the commands required to set a custom shutdown sound. Take a look at the highest upvoted answer, you can copy and paste this into your terminal.
i have been trying to get a windows startup/shutdown sound to play, i couldn't get the sounds to play so i asked on Microsoft, here is the link -us/windows/forum/all/cannot-change-windows-start-up-sound/8bbcb0a0-1402-4f1e-b080-9c8d526bc205and i was told that its not possible. well too bad because i am not going to stop there, so i went to local group policy editor on windows 10 where you can choose scripts to run during shutdown and start up. i then wrote a very small PowerShell command with the file name of "shutdown.ps1" the code inside of shutdown.ps1 isstart "C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\Scripts\Shutdown\TADA.wav"this file is located in the C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\Scripts\Shutdown directory along with the TADA.wav file that it plays when it shuts down.
now the issue i am having is that when windows is shutting down, its ending all processes so it does not play the sound. what can i do to change that?I'm pretty new to all of this and am very grateful for any input you can give.thanks in advance,Devin
And indeed, all three sound events show up in my Sounds control panel once I re-enable them in the Registry. However, I tried assigning audio files to them, and although Windows remembered the assignments, nothing played when invoking those actions.
So, I guess the playback functionality is simply not implemented for those events anymore. This seems to be confirmed in your discussion with a Microsoft Insider on answers.microsoft.com (with an 89% upvote rate of 143K replies, I would think he knows what he's talking about):
In Windows 10 there is no way to change the Windows Startup Sound, that sound is set permanently in a DLL in Windows, it is not an audio file like the other system sounds, and even when you turn on the Startup sound on that dialog, sometimes the startup sound will play and other times it will not, this is a known bug in Windows 10, which seems to have been fixed in Windows 11
Before Windows 10 came along, we were free to change the sounds that played when we shut down, logged off, or logged on to Windows. For some reason, Microsoft hid those sound actions from being modified in Windows 10. Here's how to get them back.
Windows has always been pretty good about letting you customize every nook and cranny of the OS, including what sounds played for all kinds of different system events. You can even make Windows play a sound when you toggle your Caps Lock, Scroll Lock, and Num Lock keys. While you can still customize what sounds sounds play for most OS events, Windows 10 hid shut down, logoff, and logon from view. They're still around, though. You just need to make a few mild changes in the Windows Registry to get them back.
You're going to be making one small change in each of three different subkeys inside that EventLabels key. First, we'll tackle the shutdown sound or, as Windows likes to call it, System Exit. Under the EventLabels key on the left side of Registry Editor, select the SystemExit subkey. On the right side, double-click the ExcludeFromCPL value.
Next, you're going to make exactly the same change in two other subkeys inside the EventLabels key: WindowsLogoff and WindowsLogon . Head into each of those folders, open the ExcludeFromCPL value inside, and change the value from 1 to 0.
No need to restart Windows. You can go ahead and test your changes right away. Open up the Sound Control Panel app by right-clicking the speaker icon in your Notification Area and selecting "Sounds."
how to deploy " custome " sound for windows startup from gponot only turn the features on or off i need to add custome Mp3 or wav that start playing that sound when all the employees open their laptops is it possible
Hello,
I have the same problem - trying change logon and logoff souds, but it's didn't work. I se in option this two position, changing at new sounds but after saved and apply "Play Windows Startup Sound" still don't working.
I done everything as above write