Notification sounds

The built-in six

Chime, bell, ping, register, knock and alert. They are short, deliberately unremarkable, and none of them is a fanfare — this is a notification, not an achievement.

They are synthesised rather than shipped as audio files. Six recordings would be a couple of hundred kilobytes of binary in a package that is otherwise readable text, and nobody could tell what had changed between two versions of them.

Your own sounds

Settings → Notifications. MP3, WAV or OGG, up to 1MB each and twelve files in total. A file over the size limit or a thirteenth upload is refused with the reason rather than silently dropped.

Uploads are stored on your machine like everything else, under their own storage keys so the rest of Latr never pays to load them. They do not sync between browsers — an audio file is far past what browser profile sync accepts per item — so if you use Latr on two machines, upload the file on both.

Which sound plays

Five settings can have an opinion. They resolve strongest first:

1. The reminder's own sound — the narrowest possible statement
2. A rule for its priority — critical reminders can sound different
3. A rule for its site — everything from one domain
4. Your global choice
5. Silence

Priority sits above site on purpose. A rule about urgency is a statement about this one reminder; a rule about a site is a statement about a whole category of them. And a priority rule only applies where you have explicitly written one, so critical never silently overrides a per-site sound you did set.

Site rules cover subdomains, exactly as per-site rules do everywhere else — a rule for github.com also covers gist.github.com.

The master switch

Above all five is a plain on/off for this browser. It answers a different question: "should Latr make noise on this machine at all?" — which is why a work laptop can be silent while the same reminders, synced, chime at home.

The confirmation tone is separate

Latr can play a small tone when you save a reminder, confirming the keystroke worked when no window opened to tell you. It is off unless you ask for it, it is never the reminder sound, and it is capped quieter.

Both parts of that are deliberate: an extension that makes an uninvited noise the first time you use it gets disabled rather than turned down, and "saved" arriving as the same noise as "it is time" is how a confirmation gets mistaken for a notification.

Saving is confirmed two other ways that need no sound at all — a ring drawn on the control you just used, and a message read out by screen readers.