Give Fantastical its own notification sound on your Mac

Why a Fantastical alert is easy to miss on a Mac

macOS plays one alert sound for everything and only lets you switch an app's sound on or off. So a Fantastical event alert sounds exactly like a chat message or an email — the same quiet chime for “stand-up in 5 minutes” as for a newsletter.

When you're heads-down or already on a call, that single soft banner is easy to talk right over, and you find yourself joining the next meeting a few minutes late.

What you can do without TrillMark

• Fantastical's own alerts. Fantastical gives you excellent control over when you're alerted — default alerts per calendar, custom times, alerts for events, all-day items, and travel time. But the notification itself still uses your Mac's one sound.
• System Settings › Notifications › Fantastical. Choose banner vs. alert style and toggle the sound — but there's no way to give it a distinct sound, or to make an imminent meeting louder than a low-priority reminder.
• Turning up the volume. Raising your Mac's volume makes everything louder, not just the meeting alert you actually care about.
• A Focus. A Focus can hold reminders back during focused time, but that hides them rather than making the important one stand out.

How TrillMark makes a meeting alert impossible to miss

TrillMark reacts to the banner Fantastical shows. Add Fantastical, give it a sound and a color, and choose how it flashes — a full-screen wash labeled “Fantastical” for the top of a meeting is hard to miss even if you're mid-sentence on a call or have the sound off entirely.

You can boost that sound above 100%, up to 200%, so it cuts through music or another call's audio when a meeting is actually starting. And because TrillMark can read the notification's text, you can keep the big alert for real events and let all-day items or low-priority reminders use a quiet edge band instead — or match a keyword like a project name so work meetings look different from personal ones.

It reads that text only on your Mac, only to decide how to react, and never sends it anywhere.

Set it up in about a minute

1. Open TrillMark and add Fantastical from the popular-apps list or a recent alert.
2. Give it a sound you'll recognize, and boost the volume if you want it to cut through a call.
3. Pick a color and choose a full-screen flash for the strongest, hardest-to-miss alert; TrillMark labels it with the app's name.
4. Optional: add a rule so only real event alerts get the full-screen flash, while all-day or low-priority reminders use a gentle edge band.
5. Turn off the system sound for Fantastical in Notification settings so you hear only the sound you chose.