How to Change the Slack Notification Sound on Desktop and Mobile

To change the Slack notification sound on desktop, click your profile picture, open Preferences, then Notifications, and scroll to Sounds & appearance. Pick a sound for each notification type, such as new messages or huddles. On iPhone, tap your profile picture, Notifications, Sound. On Android, tap your profile picture, Notifications, System settings, Sound. The desktop sound is saved to your Slack account for that workspace, so it follows you to other computers. Phones keep a separate sound; ours was Ding, which we never changed.

We checked the details on 3 October 2026: the sound files inside Slack 4.52.171 for Mac, the names Slack's web app gives them, and the setting on Slack's servers for our own account.

Every Slack notification sound, measured

Slack's message sound list has 13 sounds. The desktop app ships each one as an MP3 inside the app, and the web app maps each file to the name you see in the menu. We decoded the files and measured them:

Peak level is the loudest point of the file in dB below full scale: -1 dB is close to the maximum and -22 dB is quiet. Picking a sound also picks a volume. Boop peaks 21 dB higher than Wow and runs five times as long as Knock Brush.

Knock Brush is the default on desktop: four short taps in half a second. Hummus is a voice saying the word, which is why people search for it by name. For something quieter than the default, Plink and Here you go are short and peak lower; Drop is short but loud.

Change the sound on Windows, Mac and Linux

• Click your profile picture in the sidebar.
• Select Preferences, then Notifications.
• Scroll to Sounds & appearance.
• Choose a sound from the drop-down menu next to each notification type.

Per Slack's help center, the types are new messages, VIP messages (paid plans), huddles, sending a DM, and receiving a DM while you are in that conversation. The same section has two mute switches. This is how it looked in Slack in our browser on 3 October:



In the browser, where we had not allowed Slack to send notifications, the section showed only the huddle sound (Boop Plus). The message sound pickers are in the desktop app.

Does the sound change on every device?

On every computer, yes; on your phone, no. Slack stores the choice in your account's notification settings on its servers, per workspace. Ours read:

"desktop_sound": "knock_brush.mp3",
"priority_desktop_sound": "knock_brush.mp3",
"mobile_sound": "b2.mp3",
"priority_mobile_sound": "b2.mp3"

We changed desktop_sound to item_pickup.mp3 (Yoink) through Slack's API, read it back from the server, then set it back to Knock Brush. The desktop app keeps a copy of this setting for each workspace in its local state file. That means a laptop and a desktop signed in to the same workspace use the same sound, a second workspace can have a different one, and the phone uses mobile_sound (b2.mp3, which is Ding). priority_ is the VIP sound.

Change the sound on iPhone and Android

iPhone and iPad. Tap your profile picture, then Notifications, then Sound, and pick one.

Android. Tap your profile picture, then Notifications, then System settings, then Sound, and tap Save. This opens Android's own notification settings for Slack, so you can also pick a ringtone or a sound file from your phone. Slack's help center says the sound setting is not available on Huawei devices.

In silent mode, a Focus mode on iPhone, or Do Not Disturb on Android, Slack notifications arrive without sound.

Can you set a custom sound or a sound per channel?

Not on desktop. Old guides say to replace a file such as knock_brush.mp3 inside Slack's install folder. We tried that on a copy of Slack.app on our Mac, and the app's signature broke:

$ codesign --verify --deep --strict SlackCopy.app
SlackCopy.app: a sealed resource is missing or invalid

macOS Gatekeeper rejects an app in that state, and every Slack update puts the original files back. Android is the exception: its system sound picker accepts any sound file.

Sounds are set per notification type, not per channel or person. Per channel you can only choose whether it notifies you: click the channel name, then Notifications, and pick All new posts, Mentions or Nothing. To make some messages sound different, add those people as VIPs and give VIP messages their own sound (paid plans), or add Channel keywords under Preferences, Notifications.

Slack notification sound not working

Mute all messaging sounds from Slack is ticked under Sounds & appearance.

Notifications are paused by a schedule or Do Not Disturb; see why does Slack pause my notifications.

The system blocks the sound. On Windows, open Settings, System, Notifications, Slack, and turn on the sound. On a Mac, check System Settings, Notifications, Slack and any Focus mode; Slack notifications not working on Mac has the details.

You are reading that conversation, so the "while in the conversation" sound plays, or none.

The channel is set to Mentions or Nothing.

If notifications do not arrive at all, see Slack notifications not working.

FAQ

What is the default Slack notification sound called?

Knock Brush (knock_brush.mp3) on desktop. Our account's phone sound was Ding (b2.mp3), which we had never changed.

Can I make Slack silent but still show banners?

Yes. Tick Mute all messaging sounds from Slack. Banners and badges still appear.