Possible way to determine which application generates certain sounds on my system?
The simplest way I can think of is to use the Volume Mixer. It lists all the processes that are currently using the speaker as you can see here:
How to start the volume mixer:
- Win+R→"sndvol"→Enter
Alternative Solution:
It seems Process Monitor is the Process Monitor for sounds. You can set a Path filter for common audio format extensions like WAV and start capturing events. The relevant process that played the audio file should then be listed in Process Monitor.
Set the
Pathfilter to include entries that containWAV
Start capturing and wait for the process to play the sound
Look at the output to figure out which operations don't keep recurring and create an
Operationfilter to exclude all other operations and separate the signal from the noise
You should see a filtered list of processes with the sounds they've played
NOTE: You might not be able to detect ALL programs that play a sound with this method (e.g. Google Chrome playing a YouTube video) but this should satisfy your need for logging sound plays.
A possible way to trace sound generation would be to monitor calls to the various audio/multimedia APIs using an API monitor. I sometimes used http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor, it is very powerful (and moreover free); unfortunately, I didn't see an option to automatically attach to new processes, which means that you would need to manually attach the API monitoring program to every new program you start. And if you are using a 64-bit version of Windows, you would even need to run both 32-bit and 64-bit versions at the same time to be able to monitor both kinds of processes... so, possible but heavy to do.
Here is an example of Skype generating a ringtone, while intercepting calls to audio/video APIs (it did more than 1.5k API calls to produce that sound!):
Just figured out the cause of the sounds: It was a notification sound whenever a visitor navigates to our support chat LiveZilla on our website.
Following is a screenshot of the (German) options dialog of LiveZilla:
I now solved my issue of the random sounds, although the question about a "Sound trace" still seems to be answerable by only: "Not available".