Custom Slack notification sounds on Mac
What Slack offers today
Slack ships with a handful of built-in notification sounds—Ding, Boing, Drop, Hummus, Plink, Woah, and more. You can pick which sound plays for each notification type (messages, direct messages, huddles) in Preferences → Sound & appearance. That lets you tell a huddle invite apart from a regular message, which is a good start.
What Slack doesn’t offer
Slack does not let you assign different sounds to individual channels, people, or keywords. Every #random ping sounds exactly like every #production-alerts ping. If you rely on Slack for time-sensitive work—deploys, support escalations, executive threads—that’s a real problem. You either over-monitor everything or risk missing the one message that matters.
How Chirpy fills the gap
Chirpy is a native macOS menu-bar app that watches your Slack notifications and plays the sound you choose based on rules you define. You can create rules for:
- Channels — a sharp alert for #incidents, a soft chime for #watercooler
- People — a distinct tone when your manager DMs you
- Keywords — an urgent sound when someone types “outage” or your name
No browser extensions, no hacks. Chirpy reads macOS notifications directly, so it works with the native Slack desktop app. Download the free trial and set up your first rule in under a minute.
Guides in this section
Explore the topics below to learn how Slack notification sounds work and where Chirpy extends them.
Frequently asked questions
Not with Slack alone. Slack lets you pick one sound per notification type (messages, DMs, huddles), but every channel within that type uses the same sound. Chirpy adds per-channel, per-person, and per-keyword sound rules on macOS.
Yes. Chirpy reads macOS notifications directly, so it works with the official Slack desktop app without any browser extensions or workarounds.
Chirpy offers a free trial. After that it’s a one-time purchase—no subscription.