Sounds

Luft plays short, soft sounds when something happens that you might not be looking at. Everything here is in Settings, under Sound, in System sounds.

What plays when

Sound	When
Notification	A notification arrives. Low priority ones get a softer note, as do Luft asking for your password and an app asking for your permission while you’re busy elsewhere, and urgent ones, such as a disk that’s almost full, a two-tap warning
New mail	Mailman finds new mail, and a whoosh when a message is sent
Devices	A USB device, memory card or Bluetooth device connects or disconnects. Plugging in a hub with several devices plays one sound
Charging	The charger is plugged in, and the battery runs low
Volume	A tick on the speakers or headphones whose volume you changed, from the volume keys or a slider. A muted output stays silent
Screenshot	A screenshot is saved
Recording	Screen recording or sharing, the camera or dictation starts and stops
Error and warning	A password or fingerprint isn’t accepted, an app rings the bell, or an app stops responding
Sign-in	Your desktop appears after you sign in
Keyboard taps	Each key on the on-screen keyboard, with their own sounds for delete and space. Off at first

The play button next to each kind plays it once, so you can hear it before choosing.

Turning them down or off

• Volume sets how loud system sounds are, apart from music and videos.
• Each kind has its own switch. System sounds turns them all off, errors included.
• Do Not Disturb silences notification sounds, but not the volume tick or errors, which answer something you just did. Apps allowed through Do Not Disturb still play theirs.
• Notification sounds also stay quiet while a game is fullscreen or while you share your screen.
• The lock screen only plays errors, such as a wrong password.
• When an app such as Discord plays its own sound as a notification arrives, Luft’s stays quiet so you don’t hear two. A call or music the app was already playing doesn’t count.
• Each app’s notifications can play something else: in Settings, under Notifications, choose the app and set Sound to Luft’s sound, The app’s own or None.

When nothing plays

1. Check that the volume in quick settings isn’t at zero or muted.
2. In Settings, under Sound, look at Device under Output. A monitor or TV connected over HDMI or DisplayPort is a device of its own, and many monitors have no speakers.
3. Look at Connection just below it. A computer with several jacks lists each one: on a desktop, Line Out is usually the green jack at the back and Headphones the jack on the front. Choose the one your speakers or headphones are plugged into. A jack where nothing is sensed shows nothing detected, but you can still choose it, since some computers don’t report every jack.
4. Move the volume slider. Luft plays a tick on the output you chose.
5. If the device says Off, open Device profiles and pick a stereo or surround profile for it.
6. If Windows is on the same computer, shut it down fully before starting Luft: with Fast Startup, sound chips can start in the state Windows left them. Installing alongside Windows shows how to turn it off.

Still silent? Run these in Tern and send us what they print, along with the computer’s model:

wpctl status
pactl list cards
alsa-info.sh --no-upload

The last one saves a full report of the sound hardware and says where it put it.

For apps

Luft’s sounds are a standard sound theme named luft, so apps that play theme sounds use them. Apps choose a notification’s sound with the sound-name, sound-file and suppress-sound hints, or the sound option of the notification portal. An app that plays its own sound should send suppress-sound; otherwise Luft waits a moment before its sound and skips it when the app starts playing in the meantime. Apps outside a sandbox can play a sound from the theme by calling Play on com.lantharos.Kestrel.Sounds at /com/lantharos/Kestrel/Sounds on the session bus, with names such as dialog-warning or message-sent-email; the switches above still apply.