macOS desktop notifications appear but completion sound does not play

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.707.51957 (build 5175)

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 25.4.0 arm64 arm; macOS 26.4.1 (25E253); MacBook Air (Mac16,12), Apple M4

What issue are you seeing?

Codex successfully displays native macOS completion-notification banners, but those notifications are silent. This occurs both when Codex is focused and when another application is focused.

I confirmed the following locally:

• macOS lists the app under "ChatGPT" (bundle identifier com.openai.codex) with Badges, Sounds, Desktop enabled.
• Play sound for notification is enabled for the app.
• Alert volume is 100%; output is not muted and uses the built-in MacBook Air speakers.
• A normal macOS alert sound plays successfully when invoked directly.
• The bundled Codex sound at /Applications/ChatGPT.app/Contents/Resources/codex-notification.wav also plays successfully when invoked directly.
• Codex logs show the turn-complete notification being created and forwarded without an error.
• The visible notification banner arrives every time, but no sound accompanies it.
• Removing all local Codex notification overrides, fully quitting the app, and restarting did not change the behavior.
• The failure persisted after updating from build 26.707.41301 to 26.707.51957.

This establishes a problem in the desktop notification-sound path rather than general audio output or notification-banner delivery.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. On macOS, enable notifications and Play sound for notification for the Codex desktop app (listed as "ChatGPT" in System Settings on this installation).
2. Open Codex and start a normal prompt.
3. Optionally switch focus to another application while the turn runs.
4. Wait for the turn to complete.
5. Observe that the native completion-notification banner appears, but no notification sound plays.
6. Repeat while Codex remains focused; the result is also silent.

The behavior persists after removing custom notification-related entries from ~/.codex/config.toml, quitting with Cmd+Q, and reopening Codex.

What is the expected behavior?

When a completion notification is delivered and macOS notification sounds are enabled for Codex, the notification should play the configured Codex completion sound.

Additional information

Potential diagnostic lead, not a confirmed root cause: inspection of the JavaScript packaged in the installed app's app.asar shows that Codex stages codex-notification.wav in its entitled shared-group Library/Sounds directory, creates the Electron notification with silent: false, and supplies codex-notification (without the .wav extension) as the sound value.

Because current Electron/macOS notification delivery uses Apple's UNNotification API, it may be useful to compare the same notification using the default sound, codex-notification, and codex-notification.wav. Another possibility is notification-service incompatibility with the particular 24-bit stereo linear-PCM WAV, even though the file plays directly. These are hypotheses only.

Related but not exact duplicates:

• #13019 concerns desktop sessions ignoring command-line notification hooks.
• #3962 is primarily a request for audible completion notifications in the extension/CLI.

This issue was investigated and drafted by OpenAI Codex using gpt-5.6-sol. Two independent adversarial reviews were also run with gpt-5.6-sol, at medium and high reasoning effort, to distinguish verified evidence from the proposed root-cause hypotheses. Rory Watts reviewed and submitted the report from his GitHub account.