how to mute FaceTime ringer

Hi all,

After installing Yosemite and playing around with it a bit one question remains.. is there anyway to mute the ringer from FaceTime ?

Receiving the iphone's calls directly on the mac is pretty awesome but the ringing makes it a pain.. If i'm in front of the screen the notification on the upper right of the screen is enough to realize someone is calling, if i'm not, i probably have my phone with me.. if i m watching a video i'd like to be able to see that someone is calling but i don't need any sound for that... Is there a silence mode for FaceTime somewhere ?

The FaceTime preference's panel allows me to choose a ringtone but not to disable it... any help appreciated !

Have a nice day.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Oct 18, 2014 7:12 AM

Dec 15, 2015 12:27 PM in response to bedelman

Same here, bedelman. That "silent" ringtone tweak worked well in Yosemite and has still been working once I upgraded to El Capitan, but as you said, the "Silence" choice isn't showing in the drop-down menu. It's now just... blank. Of course now, I've been scared to adjust that pulldown option, or even tinker with it, for fear of losing the setting.

(I had been thinking that ideally, FaceTime would have a “None” option at the bottom of the list, just like Messages does.)

I did discover this utility, which would make it easy to add (back) in a proper "silent" (or other) ringtone:

https://sites.google.com/site/appleclubfhs/downloads/ringtone-adder-info

Unfortunately for it to work in El Capitan, you have to (temporarily?) disable System Integrity Protection.

On another El Capitan system though, I just tested the "Play sound for notifications" checkbox (in System Preferences > Notifications > FaceTime) and now, contrary to Yosemite, it actually works. So there's that...! Perhaps I don't need the "Silent" ringtone hack after all.

I was also thinking it would be great if FaceTime could have distinct notification settings for incoming FaceTime calls, vs. Handoff/Continuity/iPhone Cellular/WiFi Calling calls. Especially because with multiple devices all linked by the same AppleID, there are now very many opportunities for a single incoming phone call to invoke a cacophony of alerts across multiple devices. It can get a bit crazy.

I’ll be submitting this to Apple Feedback.