Macbook intermittently makes "ding" sound.

[russelldunphy]

My late 2008 macbook intermittently makes a gentle "ding" sound. By gentle I mean it's a sound effect, not the kind of beep you get from about to die hardware. I cannot work out at all what is causing it.

Sometimes it doesn't happen for weeks then will happen several times in a single day. It happens when I am not doing anything at all (ie. not even pressing keys).

I've checked all the sound effects that you can choose in system preferences and it's not the same sound as any of them. I don't use Mail or any other email clients but just in case I checked once when I heard the ding - and I didn't have any new mail. I've also checked my dashboard, and as far as I can see the calendar, clock, weather and calculator widgets don't seem to be set up to make some random alarm sound.

Any ideas?

 

[geoffreak]

Ding, fries are done.

If you go into the Sounds panel in System Preferences you can go down the list of Mac OSX sounds and find the exact name of the sound you hear. That will help identify the source.

 

[brn2ski00]

i bet its your mail app bro... Hello?!

 

[devburke]

I've checked all the sound effects that you can choose in system preferences and it's not the same sound as any of them.

Ding, fries are done.

If you go into the Sounds panel in System Preferences you can go down the list of Mac OSX sounds and find the exact name of the sound you hear. That will help identify the source.

Good sir, I don't believe you fully read his post.

russelldunphy, what programs do you have running when you hear the ding?

 

[rackalamb]

If i were you I would run each of the applications that you usually have open 1 at a time and see when the ding happens. It can be iChat, Skype, Mail, etc. Take each application 1 by 1

 

[geoffreak]

Ah, my bad. Long day. Monday. Head hurts

If you have any rules in Mail that delete or move any incoming mail out of the inbox, your Mail will make a sound but no new mail will appear to have arrived.

 

[russelldunphy]

I don't have any rules in Mail. I never used it until about a week ago, and then all I did was set it up and decide I didn't want to use it anyway. And I heard the ding sound long before that.

I've heard the sound with only word, textedit, safari and itunes running, as far as I can remember. Not sure why any of them would make a random sound while idle. I don't run anything like iChat, Skype etc that you might expect to do so.

And brn2ski00, thanks for your helpful comment. I guess you didn't read the original post either.

 

[Web Development]

its a sound by an app

Hi guys i had the same thing with my company macs. it was the sound by entourage email. so you need to check the sound configuration on settings or preferences in your apps.

 

[rndMacUsr]

effing entourage

Hi guys i had the same thing with my company macs. it was the sound by entourage email. so you need to check the sound configuration on settings or preferences in your apps.

Ha.. seems I'm exactly in your same situation... working in web development, which is why they gave me a mac. And yeah, I have to have entourage running and someone decided the effing thing had to notify you with a sound whenever you DON'T have new mail. AND that said option needs to be enabled by default.

Good grief... thing's been driving me crazy for weeks....

Thanks for your post 'Web Development', even though its been a good while since you posted that.

 

[4argy]

I just fixed this. It was an annoying ass widget that i downloaded. An alarm one that for some reason, would set an alarm for the next minute, when the next minute came, would re-set the alarm for the following minute.

 

[tbaer]

In my case it was Skype which alerted each time a contact came online.