beep: Play a short sound

In beepr: Easily Play Notification Sounds on any Platform

Play a short sound

Description

beep plays a short sound which is useful if you want to get notified, for example, when a script has finished. As an added bonus there are a number of different sounds to choose from.

Usage

beep(sound = 1, expr = NULL)

Arguments

sound

character string or number specifying what sound to be played by either specifying one of the built in sounds, specifying the path to a wav file or specifying an url. The default is 1. Possible sounds are: "ping" "coin" "fanfare" "complete" "treasure" "ready" "shotgun" "mario" "wilhelm" "facebook" "sword" If sound does not match any of the sounds above, or is a valid path or url, a random sound will be played. If a negative number is given or the string "none" is given, no sound will be played.

expr

An optional expression to be executed before the sound.

Details

If beep is not able to play the sound a warning is issued rather than an error. This is in order to not risk aborting or stopping the process that you wanted to get notified about.

Set the environment variable BEEPR_ENABLED to false to disable sound. The expression expr is still evaluated.

On Linux, playback waits for the player to finish and requests termination after 15 seconds.

Examples

# Play a "ping" sound
if (interactive()) beep()

## Not run: 
# Play a fanfare instead of a "ping".
beep("fanfare")
# or
beep(3)

# Play a random sound
beep(0)

# Update all packages and "ping" when it's ready
update.packages(ask=FALSE); beep()

## End(Not run)

beepr documentation built on Nov. 6, 2026, 5:07 p.m.