SoundOn!

Description
SoundOn! prevents PowerBook G4's (and other Mac models' too) speakers from turning off when you use battery power. In fact, to save energy, Mac OS X turns PB G4's speakers off after a while if no sound is played and you're using battery power. The negative side of this is that when the computer plays a sound you see the spinning rainbow cursor and have to wait for two or three seconds (while the computer waits for the speakers to be turned on) before you can continue using the computer.
SoundOn! plays a "silence" sound every twenty seconds, so that your PowerBook's speakers will be never turned off and will be ready to play when needed: so you'll stop waiting at every damn sound! :-)
You may say that this will lower the duration of the battery and probably it does, but I can say that battery performance decrease is not noticeable. Another thing... SoundOn! is not needed on Mac OS 9 since this OS doesn't seem to turn off speakers.
Note that speakers power management was optimized by Apple in Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", so if you use this version or higher of the operating system you don't need to use SoundOn!

Apple posted a kbase article about this issue, with a complete list of the affected computer models, you can find it here. The affected models are:
-iBook (Dual USB)
-iBook (Late 2001)
-iBook (14.1 LCD)
-PowerBook G4 (Gigabit Ethernet)
-Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver 2002)
-iMac (Flat Panel)

What's new in version 1.0.1
- The application automatically quits if it is launched under Mac OS X 10.1.1 or lower.
- The silence sound is executed every 20 seconds instead of 10, so that SoundOn uses even less processor time than version 1.0.

Donations
SoundOn! is freeware. By the way, if you like it you can make a donation to the author encouraging future development of this application. If you want to make a donation, click the button below:

	File Name	Size	Server	Platform
	SoundOn! 1.0.1 (Disk Image)	976Kb	Mac.com
	SoundOn! 1.0.1 (Disk Image)	976Kb	Amugsicilia.it