Monday Minutes: Audio Alerts

by Kelly McElligott on Jul 19, 2021

Jessie and Kelly will walk through the steps of setting up audio alerts and also customizing the sounds the alerts make.

Setting Up Audio Alerts

If a library has not yet turned this feature on, the system preference found in the Global System Preferences, audioalerts, will need to be set to enabled.

Koha does have pre-defined sounds connected to selectors, but all this can change depending on the library's needs.

Audio Alerts are found under the Administration section under the Category, Additional Parameters.

Adding New Audio

There are two ways that a library can add customized audio alerts.

1. A library can use a music file that is attached to an URL. The example that Kelly showed during the tutorial video was from the Internet Archive website.

2. A library can host a file on a GitHub or related website. If a library doesn't have access to this and they are a partner with ByWater Solutions, then we can host it on our GitHub site and provide the library with the URL to use in the Audio Alert setup.

In the image below, there are three different sounds showing.

Selectors

There are built-in selectors with audio alert actions. For example, .audio-alert-action is the action of triggering a hold. So if a library wanted to alter this specific sound, this would be the one to edit.

.audio-alert-success is the sound that Koha makes when you go to a patron's record.

To find out which sound is being used, this can be found in the dialog box in Koha. It has a CSS class assigned to it, which will tell the selector it is using. For more information about this, the Koha manual can be very helpful. Also, if you are a partner of ours, we would be happy to help you with this, just submit a ticket!

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