Plays one or more of the Standard Windows sounds, triggered purely from the command line. use: honk - Plays the default system sound. honk SystemStart SystemHand SystemQuestion - Plays the given list of standard system sounds (usually just one). - they are case-insensitive (you can get the case wrong and it will still work). Possible sound names are listed in the registry under: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/AppEvents/EventLabels. e.g. ActivatingDocument AppGPFFault BuildComplete BuildError BuildWarning ClipMate5_EmptyClipboard ClipMate5_Glue ClipMate5_IgnoreClipboardUpdate ClipMate5_NewData ClipMate5_PowerPasteComplete Close CriticalBatteryAlarm EmptyRecycleBin Incoming-Fax LowBatteryAlarm MailBeep Maximize MenuCommand MenuPopup Minimize MoveMenuItem Navigating Open Outgoing-Fax RestoreDown RestoreUp RingIn RingOut ShowBand SystemAsterisk SystemDefault SystemExclamation SystemExit SystemHand SystemQuestion SystemStart SystemWelcome ... You can view the list with regedit. Not all of them are necessarily hooked up to real sounds and not all of them will be in your registry. What sounds they play depends on how they are configured in the control panel. If you were daring you could even add your own and configure them. These are NOT the same as the names in the control panel or the names of the *.wav files. Or you can specify a wav file e.g. honk C:\Windows\Media\tada.wav Honk is much faster than using mplayer or player. Nothing appears on the screen. It will not hang up if several copies try to play at once. C++ source included.