Sonix

A Mastodon client that tells you what happened before you read a word of it.

Free. Version 0.5.0. Windows. Keyboard-first, built for screen readers rather than adapted for them.

No sign-up, no key. The installer puts it in your own user folder, so it never asks for an administrator. It updates itself from GitHub.

A sound for every event

Most clients play one notification sound for everything, so you still have to go and look at what happened. Sonix plays a different one for each kind of event: a mention, a direct message, a follow, a boost, a favourite, a bookmark, a poll that ended, a post that sent. You learn them in a day and after that you know what arrived without reading anything.

Every event can be switched off on its own. New posts on your home timeline are the one that can fire constantly on a busy feed, so if that is the one you don't want, silence just that one and keep the rest.

Sounds are tied to actions rather than only to things arriving. Favouriting a post and having one of yours favourited share a sound, because it is the same event seen from two sides.

The sounds are yours, not mine

Sonix ships no audio of its own. The pack it installs is silent placeholder files, under the names the app looks for, so everything works from the first launch and makes no noise until you decide what it should sound like.

That is deliberate. Sound is personal, screen reader users already run an audio setup tuned over years, and a fixed set of noises chosen by somebody else is something most people end up turning off anyway.

So pick your own. Open Options, go to the Sounds tab, and press Open sounds folder — you get a copy of every file under the right name, ready to replace. Drop in mp3, wav, ogg, flac or m4a.

To build a whole pack, copy the default folder, rename it, and put your files inside. It appears in the Sound pack list next time you open Options, and switching packs changes every event at once. Your packs live in your own folder, so updating Sonix never touches them, and a pack missing one sound borrows that one rather than going quiet.

Built on Fedra

Sonix is a fork of Fedra by Quin Gillespie and Aryan Choudhary, used under the MIT License, with the per-event sound system added. Fedra is a good client and the credit for what Sonix is underneath belongs to them.

This is not upstream Fedra and they do not support it. Anything wrong with Sonix is mine — report it here.

Free, and staying free. If it earns a place in your day, there is a donate page — pay what you like, and nothing is held back from anyone who does not.