Applications and websites fight for our attention. We want to stay connected and informed, but too many interruptions are not good for our productivity or mental health. Different applications have different settings dedicated to silencing notifications. I recently bought a new smartphone and so I needed to install and configure all the apps (which is a big task these days, same way as it always used to be with Windows PC after "format C:" and system reinstall).
Facebook Messenger for Android offers an on/off setting for all the notifications, and a choice of the sound of a notification and an incoming call. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer an option to silence the sound. You can only either choose among several different sound effects or disable all notifications of the app entirely. What if you want to keep notifications active so they appear in the Android drawer, use vibration, get sent to a smart band, and you can hear incoming calls ringing, you just want to mute the sound of incoming messages?
Here is the solution I found. It turns out you can upload a custom sound file to your smartphone and use it. For that I generated a small WAV file - 0.1 seconds of total silence. 1) You can download it from here:
Silence_100ms.wav (8.65 KB)
2) Now you need to put it into a specific directory in the memory of your smartphone, called "Notifications". To do this, you need to use an app that allows to freely manipulate files and directories, as opposed to just looking for specific content as image or music players do. If you downloaded the file directly to your smartphone, use free Total Commander to move this file to the "Notifications" directory. If you have it on your PC, MyPhoneExplorer will be a good app to connect to your phone using a USB cable or WiFi network and transfer the file.
3) Finally, you need to select the file in Messenger. To do this, go to its settings > Notifications & Sounds > Notification Sound. The new file "Silence_100ms" should appear mixed with the list of default sound effects. After choosing it, your message notifications in Messenger will be silent.
There is one downside of this method. While not audible, the sound is still playing on every incoming message, so if you listen to music e.g. using Spotify, the music will fade out for a second every time the sound is played.
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