Every time you perform an action on your Mac your Mac responds by playing a sound. There are sounds for various actions on your Mac, and you hear them every now. Be it moving a file to the Trash, capturing a screenshot, or emptying the Trash, your Mac plays a sound letting you know the action has been performed.
If you happen to perform the aforementioned tasks a lot of times and do not want to hear those sounds every time, you can have them disabled on your Mac. That way they will not play and will remain muted no matter what action you are performing.
Here’s how you can go about turning off the sound effects on your Mac.
Disable Sound Effects on Your Mac
There are two ways to do the job. The first one makes use of the system preferences panel, and the second one uses Terminal. We cover both ways in this guide for you.
The following is the first option.
1. Click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your screen and select “System Preferences…”
2. When the preferences panel opens, click on the option that says “Sound.”
3. Click on “Sound Effects” tab on the following screen to access the sound effects settings.
In the Sound Effects tab you will see an option reading “Play user interface sound effects.” That is what allows various sounds to play on your Mac. What you need to do here is uncheck the checkbox for the option to disable the feature.
You will no longer hear the sound effects when you are performing an action on your Mac. You can check to see if it worked by doing a quick action such as capturing a screenshot
If you would prefer using Terminal to do the job, then here’s the second option.
Disabling the Sound Effects Using Terminal on a Mac
While most users will use the GUI way to do the job, this Terminal method is useful for those who often use Terminal and are familiar with it as well as those who write scripts. They can include the following commands in their scripts.
1. Launch Terminal on your Mac.
2. Type in the following command into Terminal and press Enter. The command will execute, and it will disable sound effects.
defaults write com.apple.systemsound "com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled" -int 0
3. You will not get a confirmation message or anything like that, but the command was successfully executed.
4. If you wish to bring the sound effects back on your Mac, you can run the following command in Terminal.
defaults write com.apple.systemsound "com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled" -int 1
5. The sound effects should now be back on your Mac.
Conclusion
If you are bothered by the sound effects that your Mac makes, you can use the above guide to disable them on your machine.
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