Silence UI sounds on Mac without muting everything

The clicks, whooshes, and the Trash crumple bug you — but pulling the volume to zero also kills your music, your video calls, and the podcast in the background. You don't have to choose. macOS treats interface sound effects as a separate layer from everything else, so you can switch them off and leave the rest playing at full volume.

The one setting that draws the line

1. Open System Settings → Sound.
2. Scroll to the Sound Effects section.
3. Untick Play user interface sound effects.

Now play a song. It keeps going. Empty the Trash — silence. That's the whole point: this checkbox governs only the noises macOS makes about itself, and it's wired independently of your main output volume. It works the same on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

The three layers of sound on your Mac

It helps to picture Mac audio as three separate dials, because muting the wrong one is what causes the "all or nothing" frustration:

• Main output volume — the F11/F12 keys and the menu-bar slider. This is the master level for everything, so turning it down does mute your music along with the clicks.
• Interface sound effects — the checkbox above. Just the system's own clicks, crumples, and whooshes. Off here, on everywhere else.
• Alert volume — a separate slider in the Sound panel for the warning "beep" and its chosen alert tone. You can lower this on its own, too.

Because these are independent, "silence UI sounds without muting everything" isn't a workaround — it's exactly how the settings are designed. Leave the main volume where you like it, turn off the effects layer, and your Mac stops narrating itself while your media plays on.

Do it in the Terminal

The effects layer is a single key, entirely separate from volume. Setting it to false silences the effects and touches nothing else:

# Turn off just the interface sound effects
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled -bool false
killall screencaptureui

# Undo — turn the effects back on
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled -bool true
killall screencaptureui

Your output volume, alert volume, and every app's audio are untouched — this key does one job. The killall screencaptureui line just makes the screenshot shutter honour the change on the next capture.

Why Focus and Do Not Disturb won't do this

It's a common assumption that turning on a Focus or Do Not Disturb will hush the clicks and crumples. It won't. Focus modes govern notifications — which banners appear and which chimes play with them — and leave interface sound effects completely alone. Switch on Do Not Disturb and the Trash still crumples, the shutter still snaps.

That's why the checkbox in the Sound panel is the right tool and the only one for this job: it targets the effects layer specifically, independent of both your volume and your notification settings. The two work well together — Do Not Disturb for the interruptions, the interface-effects switch for the system's own chatter — but neither is a substitute for the other. If you've been toggling a Focus and wondering why the clicks persist, this is the reason, and the fix is the one setting above.

Once you've mapped the layers — output volume, interface effects, alert volume, and notifications — your Mac stops feeling like an all-or-nothing sound machine. You mute precisely what bothers you and keep everything that helps, which is exactly the fine-grained control the Sound panel was built to give you.

Tame the other independent layers

If it's really the warning beep you want quieter rather than the click effects, that lives on its own slider. See how to change the alert volume on Mac to set it separately from both your media and your interface sounds.