Changing or muting notification sounds on a Mac

Every alert on the Mac makes the same noise, and there is no way to tell from the sound whether it was a calendar reminder or a shopping site. Or the opposite has happened: an alert appeared on screen, silently, and the meeting it was announcing is now twenty minutes old. Both are common, and both are usually blamed on the wrong setting, because Mac notification sounds are not one system. They are three, layered, and each one can silence the ones above it.

The three are the system alert sound, the per application sound switch, and the sound an application plays for itself. Knowing which of the three is in play turns a vague problem into a specific one.

One alert sound, borrowed by nearly everything

The base layer sits in System Settings, in the Sound section of the sidebar. Apple's Mac User Guide describes the controls there, and the one that matters first is the alert sound list. Selecting a sound plays it immediately, which is the fastest way to audition the set without leaving the pane.

The set itself is small and fixed. On macOS 27 the system sounds folder holds fourteen entries: Basso, Blow, Bottle, Frog, Funk, Glass, Hero, Morse, Ping, Pop, Purr, Sosumi, Submarine and Tink. Anything that does not ship its own audio ends up using whichever of those is selected, which is why so many different events on a Mac sound identical.

Two things about the volume are worth knowing before reaching for the slider. Apple's guide is explicit that the alert volume is relative to the computer's output volume, so an alert slider set high still produces nothing when the system volume is muted, and lowering the system volume for music lowers alerts with it. There is also a separate control for where the sound comes out, listed as the option to play sound effects through a chosen device. On a Mac with headphones connected and a display with speakers attached, this is the setting that explains an alert nobody heard: the sound played correctly, into a device nobody was listening to.

The alert sound is a single global choice, not a per application one. There is no supported way to give Calendar one sound and Mail another through this pane. That constraint drives most of what follows.

The switches that sit next to it

The same Sound pane holds three more checkboxes that get blamed for notification problems they have nothing to do with. Separating them saves time.

The option to play user interface sound effects covers the noises the system makes for actions, such as dragging an item to the Trash. Turning it off removes those, and leaves notification alerts untouched.

The option to play feedback when volume is changed is the click heard when pressing a volume key. Apple describes it as the alert sound playing so that the new volume can be heard. It is not a notification, and switching it off changes nothing about notifications.

The option to play a sound on startup controls the chime when the Mac restarts. It is included here only because it appears in the same list and is frequently switched off by accident while hunting for something else.

For readers who need a visible signal rather than an audible one, Apple documents an Accessibility option as well. In System Settings, under Accessibility and then Audio, the screen can be set to flash when an alert sound occurs. That is the correct answer for a shared desk or a quiet office, and it works alongside a muted alert volume rather than fighting it.

Muting or restoring the sound for one application

The second layer is per application, and it lives somewhere else entirely: System Settings, then Notifications, then the application in the list.

Apple's guide lists the per application options, and the relevant one is the switch for playing a sound for notifications. Turning it off leaves the banner, the Notification Center entry and the Dock badge intact while removing the noise. That is usually a better outcome than silencing an application completely, because the information still arrives, it just stops interrupting.

The rest of that pane is worth reading in the same visit, since sound is rarely the only thing that needs adjusting.

Setting	What it changes	Typical use
Allow notifications	The whole application, on or off	Removing an application from the stream entirely
Alert style	Temporary, which disappears, or persistent, which stays until dismissed	Anything with a deadline should be persistent
Play sound for notification	Audio only	Keeping the alert, removing the noise
Badge application icon	The count on the Dock icon	A silent way to see how much is waiting
Show previews	Always, When Unlocked, or Never	Screen sharing and shared desks
Allow time sensitive alerts	Lets through what the sender marked urgent	Calls and on call rotations

One trap sits above this list. Apple documents three global controls for whether notifications appear when the display is sleeping, when the screen is locked, and when mirroring or sharing the display. The last one holds notifications during screen sharing by default. A Mac that goes silent for the exact duration of every video call is not broken, and no per application setting will explain it.

Applications that bring their own sound

The third layer is the one that makes the other two look unreliable, because some applications never touch the system alert sound at all.

Microsoft Teams is the clearest example. Its notification settings include a checkbox to use the Teams sound for notifications instead of the macOS alert sound, which means the sound heard depends on a setting inside the application rather than in System Settings. Teams also offers a notification style choice on Mac, between its own built in notifications and the native macOS ones, and Microsoft's documentation notes that choosing the native style is what makes Teams follow the device's Do Not Disturb and other settings.

WhatsApp on Mac works the same way. Its own help describes opening Notifications in the application settings, then, under message or group notifications, turning on the option to show notifications and opening Sound, where a default notification sound can be selected under Alert Tones. There is also a separate control for playing a ringtone for incoming calls. None of that is visible from the Sound pane in System Settings.

Google Chat, used in a browser, has its own list as well. Google's help describes a notifications section in Chat settings with a desktop notifications option and a separate setting for notification sounds.

The practical rule is short. If an application has a sound setting of its own, that setting wins for that application, and the System Settings alert sound never enters the picture. If an application has no sound setting, it uses whatever the system alert sound is. Checking inside the application first avoids a long search through panes that were never going to matter.

Adding a sound that is not one of the fourteen

The built in set can be extended, and the mechanism is a folder rather than a setting.

Sound files placed in the Sounds folder inside the Library folder of the home folder appear in the alert sound list alongside the system ones. The system's own set lives in the Sounds folder inside the Library folder at the root of the startup disk, and those files are AIFF, which is the safe format to match. A file dropped into the personal folder shows up for that user account only, which is the right scope for this.

There are two reasons to bother. The first is volume shape rather than taste: several of the built in sounds are short and quiet by design, and a longer or sharper sound is easier to notice across a room. The second is distinctiveness, which is the entire point when more than one thing on the Mac is allowed to make noise.

That second reason runs into the constraint from earlier. A custom sound replaces the one global alert sound. It does not create a per application sound, and it cannot be assigned to one sender. Distinctiveness at the application level only exists where the application ships its own audio.

When the problem is silence, not noise

Working through a silent Mac in order takes a few minutes and almost always lands on one of five things.

Check the system output volume and the output device first, because alert volume is relative to output volume and because sound effects can be routed to a device that is not in the room. Check whether a Focus is on, since Focus holds notifications unless the application is in the Allowed Apps list for that Focus, and Apple notes that a Focus turned on from a Mac also turns on across the other Apple devices signed in to the same account. Check the per application sound switch under Notifications. Check inside the application for a sound setting of its own. Finally, check whether the screen is being shared, which holds notifications by design.

If the alert appears on screen but silently, the delivery path is working and the problem is one of the volume or sound settings. If nothing appears at all, the sound settings are the wrong place to be looking, and the question is permission rather than audio.

Where per application sound runs out

There is a category of this problem that no sound setting resolves, and it is worth naming because a lot of time gets spent on it.

A browser holding a dozen services is, to macOS, one application. Every notification it produces carries the browser's identity, so there is one sound switch, one alert style and one Dock badge for all of them. A chat message from a work tool and an alert from a site allowed years ago cannot be given different sounds, because macOS is not being told they are different senders.

macOS offers a partial route around this. From macOS Sonoma 14 onward, Safari can save a page as a web app through File and then Add to Dock. Apple states that a web app functions independently of Safari, shares no browsing history, cookies, website data or settings with it, can show the number of unread notifications on its Dock icon, and can be added as a login item. Each one appears separately in System Settings, so one can play a sound while another stays silent. The cost is that five services become five Dock icons with five sets of settings, and nothing groups them.

A browser that keeps each web app in its own window applies the same separation without the sprawl, so a work chat and a personal account can be told apart by sound and badge while still living in one place. How that separation is arranged is described in Workspaces, and the services that fit the pattern are listed in Supported apps.

What to change first

Decide whether the goal is fewer sounds or more distinguishable ones. For fewer, go to System Settings, then Notifications, and turn off the sound for the two or three applications that interrupt most, leaving their banners and badges alone. For more distinguishable, accept that the system gives one alert sound and that real per sender audio only exists where each service is a separate sender to macOS, which is what giving each one its own window in SpaceDeck produces.