How to separate sound from different apps on Mac

What macOS offers today

macOS gives you two levels of control over notification sounds:

1. A global alert sound — chosen in System Settings → Sound → Alert sound. This is the sound that most apps use.
2. Per-app sound toggles — in System Settings → Notifications, you can enable or disable “Play sound for notification” for each app individually.

Together, these let you silence apps you don’t care about while keeping sounds for apps you do. But every app that has sound enabled will play the same system alert.

What macOS doesn’t offer

There’s no built-in way to assign different notification sounds to different apps. You can’t make Mail chime and Messages ding. Apple hasn’t added this feature in any version of macOS through Sequoia.

Step-by-step: configure per-app notification sounds

1. Open System Settings (Apple menu → System Settings).
2. Click Notifications in the sidebar.
3. Select an app from the list.
4. Toggle “Play sound for notification” on or off.
5. Repeat for each app to control which ones are allowed to make sound.

This is useful for reducing noise — silence low-priority apps and keep sound for the ones that matter. But it doesn’t solve the core problem: the apps that remain audible all sound identical.

A better approach for Slack and Teams

If your most important notifications come from Slack or Microsoft Teams, Chirpy gives you what macOS doesn’t: distinct sounds based on who sent the message, which channel it’s in, or what keywords it contains. You can hear the difference between a direct message from your manager and a bot posting in a low-priority channel — without looking at your screen.