This happens on and off for me both with RC 1, RC 2 and the new release. When I get to the Welcome screen and the chime kicks in, it sounds like someone kicked the record player while its playing. It's kind of like the sound is making a poor connection. I wish I knew how to describe it better. Anyone know what causes this and why it's intermittent? More importantly, how can I fix it.
I've had it happen too, and it's not too surprising. Technically, it's probably a "buffer underrun" - basically, Windows starts playing the sound, and then gets distracted by the seventeen other things it's doing at startup. The CPU is busy, and can't be interrupted, so the sound gets left half-played. I'm not sure there's much Parallels can do with that; maybe the audio driver can be improved to be more robust during high CPU usage, but it might be out of their control. This is a problem even on high-end recording systems; there is always a trade-off between latency (how long it takes between the "start playing" command and the time you hear the audio) and robustness (how high the CPU usage can get before you start getting underruns).
Thanks for the information Jay. Wasn't sure if it was a Parallel, Windows or Mac event, contributing to or causing the effect that I hear.
This is not the case in high end recording systems....at least it hasn't been for about 15 years. This problem has been discussed here before. Here's a thread I started addressing this exact issue: http://forum.parallels.com/thread2103.html I was hopefull that Parallels would address this issue before the final release, but they did not. I'm still using the product but for a pro audio editor, it has seriously comprimised usefulness to me due to this bug. The longer it goes on unaddressed, the more I realize that they're probably not going to focus their resources and fix a problem that seemingly only a few of us really care about. Maybe if others demand that this be fixed and/or agree this is an important issue then it will rise in thier priority for bug fixes to attend to.
I wish there was a way to turn off that obnoxious jingle altogether. The shutdown tune as well. I hate those things.
Control panel, sounds and multimedia (may have a different name in different Windows versions) and set whatever you don't want to hear to "none". I have almost all of them turned off.
