Mute Your Computer on a Schedule with SoundAsleep

Mac OS X only: If you’re the type to leave your computer on overnight—say to complete a big BitTorrent download or something along those lines—you may also have been woken up by an unexpected beep from that always-on Mac. Freeware application SoundAsleep sets up a mute schedule for your Mac, muting and unmuting the system sound at times you specify. It does one simple thing, so whether you’re using it for a quiet computer at night or you just have a quiet schedule you’d like to keep up with, the freeware, Mac OS X only SoundAsleep is there for you. Now if only the same functionality were available for our cell phones.

I actually had trouble getting this application to work correctly when testing it (i.e., it didn’t mute for me), but since I really like the idea, I decided to round up a couple other ways you could go about accomplishing this (as suggested in the comments at TUAW).

First, using previously mentioned application MarcoPolo, you can set up rules to perform time-based actions, so muting and unmuting your computer on a schedule should be simple. MarcoPolo has a ton of other functionality, though, and unless you’re planning to use it for more than just muting, it may be overkill.

Another reader suggests making an AppleScript that runs on a schedule with iCal. An AppleScript to mute the volume looks like:

…and an AppleScript to unmute the volume might look like:

…where 5 is 50% of your volume.

There are a bevy of other ways you could probably set up this sort of functionality, though SoundAsleep, if working properly, seems like the most simple. If you have more luck than I did with SoundAsleep, let us know in the comments.