How to start a system “beep”, from the built-in pc speaker, using a batch file?

WARNING: rundll32.exe Kernel32.dll,Beep 750,300 no longer works well from the command line on modern windows systems as rundll32 no longer accepts integer values (again, through the command line) and this will play the beep with the default values which is too long (and frequency is irritating):

REM Again, with warnings about running this from the command line...
rundll32.exe Kernel32.dll,Beep 750,300

or

rundll32.exe cmdext.dll,MessageBeepStub

or

rundll32 user32.dll,MessageBeep

With rundll functions you won’t need special symbols like ^G. With the first method you can also set the frequency and the time you want to beep, though see the warning that those parameters no longer work on modern systems from the command line and will instead play the annoying defaults.

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UPDATE

Other options are calling Console.Beep from .NET using PowerShell:

powershell "[console]::beep(500,300)"

or using systemSounds.bat

call systemsounds.bat beep

The capability of beeping depends on the mainboard and if the mainboard has a system speaker – which has increasingly become a rarity as systems tend to depend solely on “normal” speakers instead. An alternative is to play sound through those speakers. Here are some options:

Using the speaking capabilities of the SAPI.SpVoice:

mshta "javascript:code(close((V=(v=new ActiveXObject('SAPI.SpVoice')).GetVoices()).count&&v.Speak('beep')))"

Here this is wrapped in a batch file and the words can be passed as an argument.

SAPI.SpVoice can be used for playing WAV files and you have some packaged with the default Windows installation. You can use this script:

spplayer.bat  "C:\Windows\Media\Windows Navigation Start.wav"

Another option: Using the windows media player active-x objects to play a sound. On Windows XP it was not installed by default, but I think for the newer Windows versions it is. It also can play MP3 files:

call mediarunner.bat "C:\Windows\Media\Ring03.wav"

And one that is a little bit obscure – using the <bgsound> tag from internet explorer (which also can play mp3 files). Here’s the script:

call soundplayer.bat "C:\Windows\Media\tada.wav"

And here’s a way to use the BEL character to produce sound with easy to copy-paste code (I’ve called it a beeper.bat):

@echo off
setlocal
::Define a Linefeed variable
(set LF=^
%=-=%
)
  
for /f eol^=^%LF%%LF%^ delims^= %%A in (
   'forfiles /p "%~dp0." /m "%~nx0" /c "cmd /c echo(0x07"'
) do echo(%%A