I have a question that might be best answered by @peternlewis:
I temporarily disabled SIP and created a symbolic link for ~/Library/Sounds, pointing it to a folder in Dropbox so I can use the same sounds across different machines.
The issue is that the Notification action in Keyboard Maestro doesn't play the selected sound. When I select the sound in the action settings, it plays as expected, but when the macro runs, it plays a completely different sound.
I found a workaround by adding a Play Sound action and setting the Notification action's sound to "None," but ideally, I'd like the Notification action to play the correct sound directly. This isn't urgent since I have a solution, but I'm curious why this happens.
Is this a known limitation or issue with how Keyboard Maestro interacts with symbolic links in ~/Library/Sounds?
The notification is done using the notification API, and specifically just passes the name of the sound to the API, so what sound gets played is entirely up to the system I'm afraid.
I have the same need but have solved this in a different way.
I keep the sound effects I want to be available for Keyboard Maestro Actions on all my Macs in a folder on Dropbox.
For the standard, Play a Sound Action I have a Macro that inserts a new Play a Sound Action in my Macro, but first allows my to navigate to the sound I want to use. It changes the path to a ~ abbreviated path, so even though my Username is different on each of my Macs the sound still plays on all my Macs that are synced via Dropbox. The Macro remembers the last folder used (in a Global Variable) so, once it has been run once on a particular Mac the next time I insert a custom sound Action it starts looking for sounds in the last used folder.
For a Notification with Sound Action (what you are trying to do) I have an extra workaround. This Action does not allow you to set a path to the file you want to use. My workaround is simply to have it play no sound and add in a Play a Sound Action directly afterwards.
Thanks for the information Peter, always good to know how Keyboard Maestro goes about things.
@Zabobon This is super impressive and a lot I can learn from this. Thank you for sharing that with me and so very helpful!
It is interesting to me that the system will not look anywhere else for the sound and nice to see others who ran into the same roadblocks and came up with such a cool workaround. It's cool you even made a macro to save you the time for creating a prompt!
Thank you very much for sharing these I just put them to good use, very helpful, and will be using in the future!
