How to turn off those annoying Galaxy S4 sounds

If you're new to the Samsung Galaxy S4, you might well think you're under attack by bloops and bleeps and drops -- the cacophony of "nature' sounds Samsung's got baked into everything these days. They're there by design, of course. That whole "designed by nature" thing started last year with the Galaxy S3, and it continues in the latest iteration. They're not necessarily that harsh, they can just get a little old after the first five minutes.

Those of us who have been using Samsung devices for a while are more used to this, of course, and are pretty adept at turning them off. This post isn't for you. Move on. But things have changed a little bit in Samsung's latest, so here's your primer for getting rid of those annoying system sounds.

More: Check out our Galaxy S4 forums!

So you've got a couple options. One is to just hit the volume-down button on the left side of the phone to silence the blasted thing. But that's the nuclear approach. 

For a more surgical strike, you'll need to head into your phone's settings menu. (Get to it either by pressing the menu button on the home screen, or by pulling down the notification pane and tapping the gear icon.) Tap on the "My device" tab, then on "Sound." Obvious enough, but, again, Samsung moved things around a bit in the Galaxy S4.

You've got a few options here, but the ones we're interested in are under "System." I generally leave the "dialing keypad tone" turned on for when I make phone calls. The others, however, are the first to go. "Touch sounds" and "Screen lock sound" are history. Haptic feedback -- that's what it's called when your phone vibrates when you touch it -- I usually leave on, but this is where you nix that, too, if you want.

How to turn off the keyboard sound on the Galaxy S4

One other frequent source of noise is the keyboard. You might be tap, tap, tapping but don't want all that click, click, clicking. Understandable. That sound is easy to turn off, but it's buried inside some more menus. Go to your settings menu, then scroll down and choose "Language and Input." Now look for "Samsung keyboard" (it might be grayed-out -- that's OK) and tap on the gear icon. That gets you into the keyboard settings. Next tap "Advanced," and now at the bottom you'll see "Key-tap sound." Uncheck that -- you can kill the haptic vibration here, as well, if you like -- and you're good to go. 

It's basically the same process for any other keyboards you might have installed, including Swype, which comes on the Galaxy S4 but isn't enabled by default.