Heh...I was just helping a friend of mine with the process of making his own ringtones in GarageBand, and it reminded me of a prank we used to pull.

Back in the OS 9 days (and earlier), before multitasking OS behavior, we'd install a 2 minute long audio file of silence on a new cow-orker's machine, and set the system alert sound to that file.

When the cow-orker made a boo-boo, that file would play, locking up their system for 2 minutes before they could get back to work.

Much low-brow hilarity ensued, of course, watching the newbie try to figure out what was wrong. We stopped doing that after one new hire yanked the plug on his machine, losing a couple hours worth of work.

Good times...good times.

:)

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Good times for good pranks indeed. I remember recording the beep using the Mac's built-in mic on a co-worker's machine. Then turn the volume to full and put the Mac to sleep. The next time the coworker made a boo boo, the beep came on in full volume shouting "You dummy". We were howling with laughter while that co-worker was totally shocked.

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Here is a link to a silent MP3. I made it last year for exactly this purpose.

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Why not just flick the mute switch on the side of the iPhone?

Doc

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If I assign SILENT as a custom ringtone to somebody, then particularly annoying people become less annoying while important calls can actually get my attention.

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The alarm sound still plays when the mute switch is engaged.

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Utterly pointless.

Flip the Ring/Silent switch on the side of the phone to make it silent.

If you don't want it to vibrate, go to Settings > Sounds > Vibrate under Silent and slide it to Off.

There is no reason on Earth to record a fake "silent" ringtone.

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As the original hint notes, alarms still sound even if the phone is in Silent mode. I personally like this behavior, but for those who want even alarms to be silent, this hint provides a solution.

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Dan Frakes / Senior Editor, Macworld

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A silent ringtone when the iPhone is muted. So its more muted. That is the most useless hint ever.
Please delete!



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It would seem I wasn't quite clear enough. No matter what you do to an iPhone when an alarm goes off it plays the alarm sound. Since you can't (currently) turn the volume completely off an alarm means sound. This is sometimes quite useful but sometimes not so much. Hence the sound of silence.

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"There is no reason on Earth to record a fake "silent" ringtone. "

sure there is
I want to kill the phone ringer, but not any other audible alerts.



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"sure there is I want to kill the phone ringer, but not any other audible alerts. "

If there are other audible alerts, it wouldn't be silent then would it?

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I personally make good use of a "silent" ringtone on my iPhone.

I tend to get a more than a few, shall we say, "spam" calls that I have no interest in answering. When I receive a call from an unknown number, I simply save that number to a generic contact, and assign the "silent" ringtone to them. I repeat this process with any other unknown calls, adding them all to this same contact. This way when my phone audibly rings, I know its a legit call, and if doesn't (or just vibrates since I have that turned on), I'll know to ignore it. Even further, a simple double click to the sleep button will toss these calls directly to your voicemail.

I think of it as kind of like "junk mail" filtering for phone calls.

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http://www.myspace.com/cargoplex

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