An extremely annoying bug that plays an old ragtime tune has commandeered Google’s Gmail, after the company debuted its ‘Priority Inbox’ feature earlier this week.

Gmail users, some of whom were spooked by the glitch, bombarded the company’s email forum last night.

“Whenever I sign into my Gmail using Chrome, music automatically starts playing. This is a new issue. It's like old time dance music,” wrote barnolde on the forum.

“Occasionally there will be a sound effect like a click, a bubble, cards shuffling, a dog growling. There is no music running on my computer.”

However – embarrassingly for Mountain View – the bug is only found when a Gmail account is viewed via Google’s Chrome. It doesn’t show up in Firefox or other browsers.

“This exact same thing is happening to me. It was really freaking me out for a bit. I kept thinking, ‘This is seriously how horror movies start... soon a giant clown will pop out of my closet with an axe in hand and spray me with his fake boutonniere.’ :),” wrote OlswangerB.

“It is still happening, even though I clicked on that link and paused the video. I even closed out of chrome and restarted it and it is still happening.”

Google said it was aware of the bug and added that its team was working on a fix.

The tune itself is only supposed to play if a user clicks on a link connected to an embedded YouTube vid that demonstrates the new feature.

The Priority Inbox tool hasn’t been rolled out to all Gmail users yet. So not everyone who uses the popular webmail service in Chrome will have to put up with a 1920s jazz din nosily invading his or her computers.

For those less fortunate people whose Gmail is already riddled with the bug, which replays every time a new Gmail page is loaded, the best advice – as Gawker astutely pointed out – is to “use less Google”.

Now show us your jazz hands, dears. ®