Play Sound When Claude Idles (on macOS)

One thing from Cursor I really missed in Claude was the little sound when it requests input. I tend to juggle a few Claude sessions and my own stuff, so having to manually check when it needs my help is a bit tedious.

Turns out it’s pretty easy thanks to Claude’s hooks interface. Update your .claude/settings.json file to include these hooks:

{
	"hooks": {
		"Notification": [
			{
				"matcher": "permission_prompt",
				"hooks": [
					{
						"type": "command",
						"command": "afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Basso.aiff"
					}
				]
			},
			{
				"matcher": "idle_prompt",
				"hooks": [
					{
						"type": "command",
						"command": "afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Hero.aiff"
					}
				]
			}
		]
	}
}

The command I use is specific to macOS though:

• afplay is a built-in macOS command-line utility used to play audio files directly from the terminal.
• The referenced files are native macOS sound files that come pre-installed with the system.

I suppose this can be tweaked for Windows and other operating systems to something equivalent. Anyway, I hope this helps. :)