Terminal not beeping on bell character

I'm running a nearly vanilla installation of OS X Yosemite 10.10.1 with the usual Homebrew, MacPorts, and Fink. I have barely anything installed with these utilities. For some reason, my Terminal.app is not producing an audible bell, even with the preference enabled. I have since enabled the visual bell, and at first it didn't produce a result either until I disabled the "Only when sound is muted" option. I do not have my system's default audio device muted; it is in fact at 100% volume and fully functional. It seems like Terminal.app is under the impression that my system audio is muted for some reason. How can I get my Terminal.app to beep like it did in past versions of OS X?

Solution 1:

I came here via a search as I was experiencing exactly the same issue and tried all the steps suggested to Clay Freeman with the same results.

What worked for me was going into Systems Preferences / Sound, where I noticed that the slider for Alert Volume was at its leftmost setting. Sliding that to the right resolved the problem.

Solution 2:

There are several ways to do this on Terminal, but first make sure that in Terminal preferences > Advanced you have ticked the Audible bell option, otherwise you won't hear anything. Now you can do any of the following to get the bell:

• $ echo ^G (hold down the ctrl key followed by V and then G to get ^G)
• $ printf "\a" or $ printf \\a
• $ echo -e "\a" or $ echo -e \\a
• $ tput bel

FYI: the way you installed Yosemite, whether via Homebrew, Macports etc., shouldn't affect this issue.