The most likely cause of this problem is that QuickTime isn't properly installed on your computer. QuickTime is software that applications can use to play music, sound, and video; it normally comes with your computer.

Holiday Lights version 5 is more sensitive to QuickTime problems than earlier versions of Holiday Lights, because of the way we've optimized music to sound better with the latest version of QuickTime.

First of all, check that QuickTime knows that it should play music:

• Click the Apple menu
• Choose Control Panels
• Choose QuickTime Settings
• Choose Music from the popup menu

It should look like this, with a dot in the circle to the left of "QuickTime Music Synthesizer":

If it doesn't look like that, click on the circle to put a dot in it, then close the QuickTime Settings window.

If you still can't hear Holiday Lights music after doing this, or you were unable to follow the instructions above because you don't see a "Music" choice in the popup menu, QuickTime may not be correctly installed. To check this, open the Extensions Manager control panel on your computer:

• Click the Apple menu
• Choose Control Panels
• Choose Extensions Manager

Now scroll down to the QuickTime section (which is listed under Extensions, after the Control Panels section). You should see a listing for QuickTime™, as well as QuickTime™ Musical Instruments (among others).

There are three possible things that could be wrong in this window:

1. If "QuickTime Musical Instruments" is turned off (that is, the checkbox on the left is off), simply check the box and restart your computer.

2. If "QuickTime Musical Instruments" is missing entirely, reinstall QuickTime following the instructions below.

3. If both of those seem okay, check that the first digit of the version number of "QuickTime Musical Instruments" (circled above) matches the first digit of the version number of "QuickTime". For example, if they both begin with a 4, as shown, that's fine. However, if "QuickTime" begins with "4" and "QuickTime Musical Instruments" begins with "2" or "3", that will cause problems. Reinstall QuickTime following the instructions below.

 
Reinstalling QuickTime

If you have problems 2 or 3, you need to reinstall QuickTime. QuickTime is free software from Apple computer, and you can download it at no charge from www.apple.com/quicktime.

After downloading the QuickTime installer, be sure to do a Full installation, as shown in this picture:

Don't choose Minimum, because that option won't install QuickTime Musical Instruments. (In fact, the most likely cause of problems 2 and 3 above is that you previously chose to do a Minimum Install.)

After installing, check the Extensions Manager window again to make sure that there aren't any problems. In rare cases, we've heard that even a Full installation doesn't install QuickTime Musical Instruments: if that's the case, you can choose a Custom install and just choose the music option, as shown below:

If you still can't hear any music after all this, let us know what versions of QuickTime and QuickTime Musical Instruments you have on your computer, and we'll do our best to help.

 
See also:
Why is the Music Box empty?
I've downloaded a MIDI file from a Web site, but it won't play.
Why does the music sound staticy, skip, or slow down?