How to kill system sounds in High Sierra?

Also, you can choose a considerably less annoying sound for your alert sound.....

You can record two seconds of silence (forest sounds, whatever) to replace your present alert sound.

Put your custom sound(s) (.aiff format) into ~/Library/Sounds (the Library of your home folder, not of the System).

These sounds will appear in your:

System Preferences -> Sound -> Sound effects.

And you can choose the one you want as alert beep (the annoying sound you hear when you do some mistake is here).

If you are gettin an error tone, turn off the Alert volume in Sound System Preferences.

quote: "One way I can force sounds is to open calendar and create an event and type a letter when my cursor is over a time field that requires a number (e.g., if you were trying to type A1:00 AM, it will beep when you hit that 'A')."

Yep, I had well understood that: here, that's the global (system) error beep, that you hear. Not the one of the app.

The only problem now is: if — when you put the "Alert volume" slider to zero in the 'Sound Effects' pane of your Sound prefs — all your other sound notifications also disappear, then you need to record a silent sound, put in your Sounds folder (in your username's Library), and select it in Sound preferences -> Sound effects -> 'Select an alert sound'.

If (really) all these sounds are controlled by this same slider, it's the only way to separate the system beep from all the others.

Try to check this yourself by changing system's default alert sound by anything else (the painful 'Ping' for instance, so that you can recognise it well when you make your tests). In Sound preferences -> Sound effects -> 'Select an alert sound'.

I propose you to uncheck all alert styles (including visuals) in every app in System Preferences -> Notifications list, then to restart, and go review thoroughly each app in the list and decide exactly what kind of notification your really want it to display. Including visuals. If the problem continues after that, we'll see (it may be yet another corrupted .plist file, if we force it to refresh a tad, maybe it will help...).

Hi,

In System Preferences -> Sound -> Sound Effects you can still uncheck "Play user interface sound effects" (but it's general).

Be sure to let checked "Play feedback when volume is changed" (for obvious reasons, especially if you have a very powerful sound system connected to your Mac...) (better know the actual sound volume when you launch some music and movie just after all that silence... 😉

For the others: In addition, you can, in System Preferences -> Notifications, uncheck "Play sounds for notification" for all apps you don't want to hear (you can also uncheck some visual notifications for the ones you don't want to see, either...)

PS: Are you sure that only Calendar is using sound alerts? I may be wrong, but I suspect that all the options proposed in Notifications are checked "on" by default. This is the feeling I have, when looking at my recent installs, at least.

Try check/uncheck the app(s) that annoy you with their sounds, to see if something changes.

Regards.

User interface sounds should have done it, right?

No. User interface sounds are not alerts. UI sounds are things like the Mail sent sound. Alerts are incorrect behaviors. Those alerts are also nothing to do with notifications.

Errors sounds and Notification sounds are different. Probably error sounds is the last thing to stay, even when other sound notifications are silenced.

Actually, I'm unsure if Contacts (we are well speaking about Apple's Contacts app?) itself is able to send you notifications... they should IMO come rather from messages, calls, video calls and mails from (indeed) your contacts.

Try the same "weird" manipulation (disable also its visual notifications) on Notifications preferences of these apps (one at a time) to try to isolate the one(s) that may cause the problem.

(not many volunteers, eh? 😕)

I was wrong, there's a possible source for sound alerts in Contacts: you can define (or possibly they are set by default...😕) custom 'ringtone' and 'text tone' for each of your contacts, it's on each and every contacts cards... (sigh)