Randomizing the Alert Sound on a Mac

Soundwave image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Adding custom alert sounds to your mac is easy peasy (see Step 0). But after a while of having a specific snippet from this classic piece of Québécois culture, I got kinda bored with it. What if I could get a different “tabarnak” everyday? Or add a few of Homer Simpsons’ famous “D’ho!” in the mix?

Well, a tiny Python script and a single cron job is all I needed to get not only one custom alert sound, but many custom alert sounds that change automagically.

If you want to randomize your alert sound without adding custom ones, you can do that too, just use the default sounds shipped with your mac.

Step 0: adding custom alert sounds to your mac

After you’ve selected nice and short audio clips, convert them to .aiff and place them in your Sounds folder. The full path: /Users/{yourName}/Library/Sounds/

Note that you could also modify the folder where the sounds shipped with your mac are stored (/System/Library/Sounds/) but I tend to not modify the default filesystem if I don’t need to.

Once those files are where they need to be, you can select them right from System Preferences, under “Sound”, “Sound Effects”.