Basics4Mac - Quieting Down Your Mac

Get rid of the Dings and Whooshes

Mail Sounds in Preferences
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Somewhere along the line, I've gotten into the habit of keeping the system volume on Mute on my MacBook. I un-mute when I need to hear something and then re-mute.

I just happened to keep the sound volume up this week and quickly realized why I keep it muted: the Mac can be a noisy beast. Clicks then you drag and drop. Whooshes then you send mail and dings when you receive mail.

Rather than muting and un-muting all the time, it is easy to turn off the sound effects that your Mac makes.

Mac OS X and most applications have sound settings in their preferences.

To turn off System sounds, go to the Sound pane of System Preferences (from the Dock or the Apple Menu). On the Sound Effects tab are three checkboxes you can uncheck to quiet different system sound effects.

The first checkbox "Play user interface sound effects" seems to imply that it will shut off the sound effects in all applications, but no, this is not the case. To turn off the sound effects in other applications, you have to go to that applications's preferences.

Mail is the other major application that is noisy. I can understand the ding when new mail arrives, but for me, the Mail icon badge in the Dock is enough notification. And why do I need a whoosh when mail is sent? All of the sound effects in Mail are easy to turn off from the General tab in Mail's Preferences.

If you are working towards the goal of a quiet Mac, you might run into other applications that have sound effects. Most of the time here is a way to turn them off in that application's Preferences. The one exception that I have run into is a very old version of Microsoft Word that I still use occasionally. It is loaded with sound effects and there doesn't seem to be any way to shut them down.