iEcosystem iPad

Disable / Turn off iPad sounds: New Mail, Sent Mail, Calendar Alerts, Lock Sounds, Keyboard Clicks

By default, your iPad is configured to play a sound for certain events: if you have used your iPad for any length of time, you will be familiar with nearly all these sounds. The "New Mail" sound plays when you receive new emails; "Sent Mail" plays when your iPad successfully sends one or more email messages. The "Calendar Alerts" sounds occur when you get reminders from your iPad's built-in calendar application. "Lock Sounds" can be heard when you click on the sleep button on the top right edge of your iPad, and the "Keyboard Clicks" happen every time you hit a key on the digital keyboard. As you'll learn in this tutorial, you can disable all iPad sounds, or selectively turn off only some of them, like the keyboard sounds or sent mail sound, which are repetitive and loud, respectively - most other sounds don't occur too often, and are played only once, making them arguably acceptable in a public place.

Turn off all sounds on your iPad (or change their volume level)

Follow these steps to disable any even sound from playing on iPad:

  • Click on the iPad Home button Click on the "Home" button, and flick through Home screens until you find the "Settings" icon: then tap on it.
  • Once the iPad Settings screen loads, tap on the "General" settings on the left (should be automatically selected).
  • Then, tap on "Sounds" and your iPad will show a volume slider, followed by 5 On/Off switches.
  • The volume slider at the top allows you to set the volume of the even sounds we mentioned separately from the actual iPad sound level: in other words, you could be playing a video at full volume, but have your event sounds set to 50% loudness. When you finished watching your movie and receive an email, that sound would play at 50%, not at the full volume. To completely silence all iPad event sounds, drag the volume slider all the way to the left.

Disable individual event sounds on your iPad

The On/Off switches allow you to selectively turn off specific iPad sounds, like the "Sent Mail" sound (since you cannot individually adjust the volume on a sound-by-sound level). Simply tap once to turn off a sound, or tap once more to re-enable the selected sound.

Tip: In case of doubt, if the word "Off" is visible on the switch, it means that the sound in question is turned off at this point, and not that you need to tap on it to turn it off.

Once you have finished disabling all sounds by setting the volume slider to mute, or configured certain sounds to be turned off, just click on the Home button to return to what you were doing. The new settings have been applied (no Save button to tap, or anything).


iPad Tutorial

Unless noted otherwise, these free iPad tutorials apply to Wi-Fi model and iPad Wi-Fi + 3G models, and updated to cover iOS 4.

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