How can I find the program making a harmonica sound?

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?

Josh

Posted 2010-04-20T12:37:56.840

Reputation:

Hello Josh, welcome to Super User. You should create your account here, and associate it with your Stack Overflow account in options. Thanks to that, you will recover ownership over this question. – Gnoupi – 2010-04-20T12:51:28.263

This is funny, sounds like the receiving end of a practical joke! – marcusw – 2010-04-20T12:52:15.767

Answers

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.

HTBR

Posted 2010-04-20T12:37:56.840

Reputation: 193

That's a good idea: search for the sound file, and lock/rename it and see what breaks. – Satanicpuppy – 2010-04-20T14:04:23.400

Not really sure how I'd be able to do it programatically; but I would start by restarting the computer, but stop any programs that are set to run on startup.

Turn them on one by one and wait for a while to see if the sound reappears. If it does; it's most likely the latest program you turned on.

If I had to take a stab in the dark; check your IM clients; this was happening to me until I figured out that someone on my contact list somehow configured it to play a sound every time they logged on/off

Jim B

Posted 2010-04-20T12:37:56.840

Reputation: 255

I had something similar with a "whoosh, whoosh" sound playing on my XP computer. Turns out I had a search window open and the stupid animated dog makes that sound when it scratches itself, even when the sound theme is set to "no sound". Perhaps you have a similar issue and an animated "helper" is continually proving that he is, in fact, an abomination.

Sam Skuce

Posted 2010-04-20T12:37:56.840

Reputation: 295

-1

Use Process Monitor and use a filter to track down the process using sound files (say wav or mp3 or ...). The solution is given here: How to Find Which Application Is Making Sounds in the Background?

user276692

Posted 2010-04-20T12:37:56.840

Reputation: 1

3Hi and welcome to Superuser. Could you please quote or reword the important parts from the link you posted? In case the link goes down your answer will still be helpful then. Thank you! – Saaru Lindestøkke – 2013-11-25T01:37:11.383