Setting a Custom Alert Sound On a Mac

If you don't want to use one of the macOS default alert sounds, you can use your own sound file instead. You can also set this for your Mail app incoming mail sound.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is gary with macmost.com today let me show you how to set a custom alert sound on your mac
macmost is brought to you thanks to more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so whenever you try to do something on your mac that isn't allowed and in a few other situations you get an alert sound for instance here i'm in contacts and i've selected one of the categories here on the left instead of an actual contact so if i hit the delete key i get the alert sound you can set your alert sound in system preferences and then go to sound then sound effects and here you can select an alert sound and you can go through all of the different built-in system alert sounds and select one then you can also select what speaker or headphone or other audio device you've got where the sound should play through and the volume for the sound but what if you don't want to use one of those what if you want to take your own sound file and use that as your own custom alert sound on your mac well to start let's get an alert sound so here i've got a sound just an mp3 file you could have recorded this yourself you could have made it in garageband or any sound editing app you could have gotten it from a friend you could do anything you want to create this sound file now we're going to take that and put that into a special location where it will add that sound to the list but first it has to be the right type so here you can see this file is an mp3 file that won't work in order for it to be a system alert sound it needs to be using the file format aiff which is the standard lossless apple mac format that goes back a couple decades so when you're creating the sound or converting it in whatever sound app you're using make sure you export as aiff and that will work however you can trick mac os into thinking any sound is an aiff file you see sound files contain all sorts of different formats and compression types so no matter how you name it whether it's mp3 aiff m4a when a mac goes to play the sound in most cases it's going to actually look at the format in there and play that sound no matter what's actually in the file so i'm going to take this mp3 file and i'm just going to rename it using aiff at the end and even though i know it's an mp3 file it will still work i can click on the icon here and it will play so now let's put it in the proper place in the finder i'm going to create a new finder window here and i'm going to go to the library folder now if you look in the go menu you'll see the library folder here you don't see it well that's because you need to hold down the option key and the library folder appears there you have to hold the option key down for library to appear select it and now you're in the library folder let's switch to column view and under library look for the folder called sounds if you don't see this folder it's okay to create an empty folder here just name it exactly sounds now let's move this file into it so now in my sounds file i've got this aiff file so now if i look in system preferences go to sound under sound effects in addition to the default sounds there's the one i just added you see you can't change the rest of these sounds because they're part of the system and the system is right protected so it can't be messed with but in your own library folder you can add sounds and it turns out that the sound effects look in both the system library sounds folder and your individual user accounts library sounds folder for sounds that's why this appears here as well as the rest so test out the sound here and once it's set you'll find that it works in situations where you do something and the alert sound needs to play so again here i'm going to hit delete in contacts without anything selected and i get my own custom sound now there is one other place where you can use these system alerts and that's in the mail app the mail app has a special sound that plays when you get a new message so here in mail go to mail preferences and then go to general and you can see new messages sound and it will be set to new messages sound which is a special sound in the mail app but you could also select one of the system sounds and you can see in this case all of the default ones are in a set by themselves and then your custom ones are at the bottom so now that sound will play when you get a new message and note that you don't have to set this to be the same sound so you can add several sounds to your library sounds file and then set one to be your system alert sound and another one to be your incoming message sound now if you're looking to change other default sounds well you'll find that you can't there's just no setting in mac os for other sounds for instance you can't change the sound that plays when you put an item in the trash or empty the trash in addition you can't change notification sounds and notifications are what most apps use when something happens so for instance in reminders here i have a reminder set to trigger notification at a specific time and if i go to system preferences and then notifications and then reminders i can turn on and off play sound for notifications but i can't change that notification sound so we should hear it here in a second
so there it is that's a special sound and it comes from the reminders app itself when an app sets up a notification it can include a sound so different apps can include different sounds to play and you can't customize them you can only choose to not play them if you want now there's nothing to prevent an app from actually letting you choose a sound for the notification and that would usually be found in the preferences for that app but in the case of reminders there's no such setting third-party apps may be different and in the future apple may add more options in its built-in apps so if you're looking to set up custom notification sounds you're out of luck that's not related to the system alerts now one thing people may want to do is to actually turn off the alerts and you could do that in system preferences sound you can simply set the alert volume all the way down another thing you could do is you could set it up so that you have a silent sound that plays so for instance you can have a silent sound for the male app and keep a regular sound for system alerts to create a silent sound you can just use quicktime player for instance create a new audio recording record nothing
and then when you get the result here command t to trim it's also under edit trim and then you could trim this down to nothing now you've got this empty sound here if you save you could save this out as silent.m4a m4a is not going to work because it's got to be an aiff so we'll change that to aiff and then you could add that to the library sounds folder here alongside any others that you've added and now in system preferences and in mail you can set your sound to be your own silent sound if you set the sound to silent one thing you may want to do is in system preferences go into accessibility and then there under audio there's a check box here for flash the screen when an alert sound occurs so you've got a silent alert but you see the screen flash when an alert actually happens so it's quiet but you still are getting some sort of feedback hope you found this useful thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Setting a Custom Alert Sound On a Mac”

Daniel

7 months ago

Amazing!!! THank you so much!! I’ve been looking for the solution everywhere and this video did it all for me!

Chris

2 months ago

You are a STAR! I’ve just upgraded iMac and iPhone from some really ropey old ones and this tutorial is not just a timesaver – it’s a life saver too! Brilliant!

Setting a Custom Alert Sound On a Mac

Comments: 2 Responses to “Setting a Custom Alert Sound On a Mac”

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