WTF?

[Cross posted to and …]

Anyone want to chip in some advice on this weird problem? It seems that for the last while, each time I wake my PowerMac^† from sleep, it plays some jazz. Good jazz, but unknown jazz.

And yes, I’m serious.

What happens is that a few seconds after waking up I start hearing some quality jazz being played out of the normal audio out. Then, just about 10 seconds of music play before it suddenly stops and the machine functions as normal.

Because I’m so confused / flabbergasted by the problem, I made a video of it happening. Feel free to download the video from here. It’s a 5.9MB h.264 video just simply dumped from my camera then encoded…

Running apps that could maybe do this are iTunes (it’s not playing, and there is a different kind of music currently queued), QuickTime (nothing open), iChat, and some Vidi (TV tuner app, but the audio isn’t the currently tuned channel on the external tuner).

I’m going to go attempt to nail down what it is, just because I’m really, really confused. Google’s turning up nothing, and I don’t have a single piece of music that is the same as what’s being played.

^†Original Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5 / 2x 160GB disks / 1.5GB RAM / OS X 10.4.1

UPDATE: Problem solved. It seems that RabbitRadio, a poorly functioning Dashboard widget for streaming NPR stations, was the cause. See, I installed RabbitRadio and had some issues with it not working for more than a brief period of time. Well, it seems that each time I wake my machine from sleep, it (while running in Dashboard) was firing up and playing my selected NPR station (WDET) until it crapped out — for right about 10 seconds.

Conveniently when I was doing the sleep-wake-sleep-wake cycles and killing off apps, one of the periods of audio happened to be Ed Love‘s (scroll down) distinctive voice, whom I immediately recognized from WDET. It just so happens that the times when I wake my computer since installing RabbitRadio have happened to all be after 7pm on weeknights, during Mr. Love’s show.

I still don’t know why RabbitRadio doesn’t work right for me, nor why it would actually start playing whenever I woke my Mac, but the problem has at least been solved. Part of me is rather disappointed, though. I was sort of hoping there was some deep mystery or easter egg which caused my Mac to spout forth really quality music. Ah well.