Command "beep off" does not work as intended. Has anyone found a solution in the (10+) years this issue has been known?

The command "beep off" does not work as expected. When backspacing, scrolling through command history, and many other common situations, MATLAB still triggers an OS error beep, even with beep disabled. The only apparent effect is that "beep off" silences the "beep" command, but does not affect any other source of beeps, despite the documentation suggesting otherwise.

Some people seem to report that "beep off" works as expected on Linux & Mac, so it seems likely that this is a Windows-specific MATLAB bug.

It is not clear whether this is truly a bug (as in, unintended behavior) but it is certainly undesireable behavior. There are 10+ years of questions on this forum, StackExchange, and others, about how to disable the annoying chime MATLAB constantly makes. It seems MathWorks is well aware of thie issue and has chosen to do nothing about it for decades, despite so many bug reports and feature requests.

It is not possible to mute MATLAB because the beep is performed by the OS via a trigger. Disabling all error sounds system-wide is an unacceptable solution. This is a very simple quality-of-life improvement which could be implemented by fixing "beep off" or adding an option in Preferences.

Is anyone aware of a working solution in R2022+ to disable beeps? Undocumented functions, 3rd party scripts, or something else I'm unaware of?

Thanks for the help!

[Walter Roberson]

On my Mac with R2022b, beep off does not silence the beep you get from down-arrow when you are already at the end of the history.

[Daniel Kennedy]

Good to know that it's not an issue exclusive to Windows!

Answer 1

[Arun]

Hey Daniel,

I understand that you want to disable beep sound and think that ‘’beep off’’ is not working properly and thus you are facing the issue.

Executing the “beep off” command turns off the beep for errors or Simulink simulation completion but does not universally disable the beep. This means that the software will still beep when hitting backspace on an empty command line or pressing arrow down on an empty command line.

Here are few methods that you can try for silencing the desired aspects of the beep:

1. Mismatched delimiter beeps can be specifically turned off or changed to strikethrough in Preferences > Keyboard > Delimiter Matching.
2. Turn off the default tone in the OS sound settings (e.g. in Windows, set "Default Beep" to "None" in Control Panel >Hardware and Sound > Sound > Sounds > Program Events). This will disable all beep sounds in MATLAB but will also interrupt other programs that rely on the default tone to notify you.

For more information related to the “beep” command please refer the below MATLAB documentation link:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/beep.html

You can also check the below MATLAB answers link for reference:

https://www.mathworks.com/support/search.html/answers/84916-how-to-disable-beep-beep-off-does-not-work.html

Hope this helps.