Mac notification sounds
Can you set different notification sounds per app on Mac?
Not with macOS alone. System Settings gives you a single alert sound that every app shares, plus an on/off toggle per app under System Settings → Notifications. A handful of apps ship their own sound (Slack and Messages, for example), but within those apps every notification still sounds identical. There is no built-in way to say “#incidents should sound different from #random.”
What you can change natively in macOS
- The system alert sound: System Settings → Sound → Alert sound. This changes it for every app at once.
- Alert volume: a separate slider from your main output volume.
- Sound on or off, per app: System Settings → Notifications → pick an app → “Play sound for notifications.”
- Focus modes: silence everything except an allow-list of apps or people.
What macOS cannot do
macOS has no concept of a notification rule. It cannot match on the text of a notification, so it cannot give you a different sound for a specific Slack channel, a specific person in Messages, or a specific sender in Mail. Focus modes can silence things, but silencing is not the same as distinguishing. You still have to look at the screen to know what happened.
How to get a different sound per app, channel, or person
This needs a third-party app that reads macOS notifications and matches them against rules you write. Chirpy is a native menu bar app that does exactly this: it watches Notification Center via the macOS Accessibility API, matches each incoming notification against your rules, and plays the sound you assigned. Rules can match on app, channel, sender, or any keyword in the notification text, combined with AND/OR. Everything runs locally, so notification content never leaves your Mac.
Chirpy costs $19.99 as a one-time purchase and requires macOS 13 (Ventura) or later. There is a 3-day free trial with no credit card and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Which guide do you need?
The guides below cover the macOS-level questions. For app-specific instructions, see the per-app notification guides. There are step-by-step pages for Slack, Teams, Discord, Mail, Calendar, and 100+ other Mac apps.
Frequently asked questions
Not with macOS alone. System Settings → Notifications only lets you turn sound on or off per app; the sound itself comes from a single system-wide alert sound. To assign a different sound per app you need a third-party tool such as Chirpy, which matches notifications against rules and plays the sound you chose.
Open System Settings → Sound and pick a different Alert sound. This changes the sound for every app that uses the system alert. Alert volume is a separate slider on the same screen.
Not natively, because neither macOS nor Slack supports per-channel sounds. Chirpy adds this by reading the notification text and matching it against rules you write, so #incidents can sound different from #random and a DM from your manager can sound different from everything else.
Check three things in order: Focus mode is off (Control Center), “Play sound for notifications” is enabled for that app in System Settings → Notifications, and Alert volume is above zero in System Settings → Sound.