https://faq.i3wm.org/questions/Frequently asked questions and answers about the i3 window managerenCopyright i3, 2012Mon, 30 Jun 2014 13:57:29 +0000https://faq.i3wm.org/question/4000/how-can-i-get-audible-desktop-notifications-with-i3/Hey guys. All I want out of life is desktop notifications that play a sound. Why is this so hard? Here's what i've tried: * I'm using i3 on Ubuntu, and I launch gnome-settings-daemon from my i3 config, so by default notify-osd is running. I cannot for the life of me configure notify-osd to play a sound. I've googled and googled and googled, everything says that you just have to select a sound theme in your gnome-control-center, well I've done that and notify-osd does not play a sound. (I should mention, I know that my soundcard is working, because the sound config panel is able to play test sounds, and I can watch youtube videos, and other things can make sounds. But notify-osd does not make a sound. Ever.) * Then I thought i would try out dunst. Dunst of course does not have any sound feature, but it has a feature to run a script. So I wrote a script that plays a sound! Here's the weird thing though: If I run dunst from a terminal, it works great! Plays the sound no problem. But when I start dunst from my i3 config, it totally fails. The first iteration of my script failed because I was using the 'play' command, which by default does not play any sound when run backgrounded. but then I switched it to 'play -q', confirmed that running my script backgrounded still plays a sound, but *still* running dunst from i3 config does not play a sound. What is going on here?!?! here is my script: $ cat .local/bin/dunst_sound.sh #!/bin/sh -e play -q /usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/glass.ogg Here is the relevant part of my dunstrc: [sound] summary = "*" script = ~/.local/bin/dunst_sound.sh Aaaand here's the relevant part of my i3 config: exec dunst & exec gnome-settings-daemon What have I done wrong here? Please note, this question isn't "how can I make dunst play a sound". If there's some other notification tool that plays sounds, by all means please recommend it. But I mean, what the heck is going on here? * Running `play -q ...` in a terminal plays a sound. * Running `play -q ... &` in a terminal plays a sound. * Running `dunst_sound.sh` in a terminal plays a sound. * Running `dunst_sound.sh &` in a terminal plays a sound. * Running `dunst` in a terminal plays sounds when notifications come in. * Running `dunst &` in a terminal plays sounds... * BUT running dunst from my i3 config DOES NOT PLAY SOUNDS. Wut?Mon, 16 Jun 2014 20:06:09 +0000https://faq.i3wm.org/question/4000/how-can-i-get-audible-desktop-notifications-with-i3/https://faq.i3wm.org/question/4000/how-can-i-get-audible-desktop-notifications-with-i3/?comment=4073#comment-4073You could also use https://github.com/sboli/twmn ....you can specify a sound command for all notifications i.e. sound_command=/usr/bin/aplay /path/to/some/wavMon, 30 Jun 2014 13:57:29 +0000https://faq.i3wm.org/question/4000/how-can-i-get-audible-desktop-notifications-with-i3/?comment=4073#comment-4073https://faq.i3wm.org/question/4000/how-can-i-get-audible-desktop-notifications-with-i3/?answer=4002#post-id-4002Well I wasn't able to figure out dunst. Instead I simply wrote a plugin for my IRC client (Smuxi) to just play the sounds itself. The upside here is that I programmed it to play different sounds based on different highlights, but the downside is that now the script has to load & parse the smuxi config for my highlights every time I receive a message, which can be inefficient. My karma is insufficient to publish links, but if you were to browse through the robru/dotfiles project on github, and look under `.local/share/smuxi/...` you would find the script, if you were interested.Tue, 17 Jun 2014 04:03:46 +0000https://faq.i3wm.org/question/4000/how-can-i-get-audible-desktop-notifications-with-i3/?answer=4002#post-id-4002