After something like 8 or 9 years, I finally decided to upgrade my computer speakers. The new system sounds awesome, but it has a feature, that in the context of use with a computer, is a humongous flaw: after a period of time with no signal input, the amplifiers power down into standby mode, and it takes a few seconds for the amplifiers to power back up when a signal is received. A computer speaker system needs to be ready and able to immediately play a sound, even if the system has played no sounds in hours.
What I needed is a "keep alive" program that periodically plays a sound, thus keeping the amplifiers powered up. Of course, if the sound were audible, it would be really obnoxious. So, I went to: http://onlinetonegenerator.com/ and downloaded a 10 second .wav file of a 15,000 Hz tone, which I edited with Audacity to fade in and fade out. Then I Googled 'windows timer freeware' and downloaded SnapTimer: http://dan.hersam.com/software/snaptimer/index.html I put a shortcut to it in the Startup folder so that the timer starts when the computer boots up, and I configured it to play the 15,000 Hz tone every 10 minutes. Problem solved. Cost: $0
