Here's an interesting problem....

My MacBook Pro is making beeping sounds which seem to be getting more frequent. I heard them for the first time this afternoon and now I've heard them again possibly 10 times in the past hour.

I have no idea about the source/cause of the beeps, but I'd love to find out. In fact I'd love a general solution to be able to find out which program or process is responsible for making any audio output.

Has anyone seen such a program available? Even if it were something that output a note to the console, it doesn't need a GUI. Basically something that would sit idle and then make a note of any sound output event, at least by labeling the source app/process and the time.

Not sure of a program, but are you moving the laptop when you hear the noise? Could be the sudden motion sensor kicking in, making the hard drive produce a beep like noise when it's trying to rapidly park the heads.

In every case the notebook has been motionless. When I first heard the issue it was sitting on my lap, but motionless nonetheless. When I wrote the email, just after hearing it a bunch of times, it had been sitting on my desk.

I haven't heard the noise since. It definitely didn't sound like an HD head movement as it was clearly a beep/blip. Two quick sounds actually. It could have been a sound produced by a piezo disc, but it was definitely a beep.

I did some Google searching and no one was able to explain the beeping sounds they were hearing last year. An update from Apple last fall supposedly addressed an HD issue which some were also blaming the sounds on. But I don't know if these are the same sounds I heard - the samples I saw linked were offline.

The sounds are definitely coming out of the speakers. It's happening now every few seconds and is really bugging the hell out of me. Arrrgh.

I figured out where the sound was coming from. Arrrgh.

It was some type of alert beep being generated by Windows 7 through my remote desktop connection. This is a clear case of Microsoft trying to be smarter than its customers, since I had already made sure to turn off every single sound in the Sound control panel. Apparently MS thinks I mean every sound except whichever they still feel like making.

The only solution I've been able to come up with is to turn off sound in the remote desktop client. I happened to chance upon this as I must have hit shift a few times and caused the accessibility request window to come up which played the beeps. However yesterday there were no windows or visual warnings coming up along with the sound that I could see. At least if there were, they were transient and short-lived at that, so when I would flip back to RDC I wouldn't see anything.

Windows 7 wasn't my idea, and I'm not a piece of hardware or a product. Worst ads ever.