Custom Slack notification sounds on Mac

How to change Mac Slack notification sound

Slack’s built-in preferences let you assign sounds per notification type. Below you’ll find what’s possible natively on Mac, and how Chirpy adds per-channel, per-person, and per-keyword sounds on top.

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.

The GitHub script route

Two open-source projects called slack-sounds show up whenever someone searches for this. One swaps the file behind Slack’s “Hummus” sound inside Slack’s Electron cache: a single custom sound, capped at about a second, and it dies the next time Slack updates or refreshes that cache. The other runs a Slack bot with OAuth scopes and Socket Mode, which does give real per-channel sounds — in exchange for a workspace app, a permanently running Python process, a .wav per channel, and inviting the bot into every channel you want to hear. Both are worth reading. Here is what each one actually does, and where it stops.

Guides in this section

Explore the topics below to learn how Slack notification sounds work and where Chirpy extends them. Hearing nothing at all? Start with the Slack notification sound not working on Mac checklist, then come back for per-channel sounds.