If you’ve recently been hearing strange notification sounds coming from your PC and can’t figure out which application is responsible, the Epic Games Launcher could be the culprit. Several users have reported hearing random “ba bing” or similar sounds while using their PCs, even when they weren’t actively doing anything inside Epic’s launcher.

The good news is that the source of these sounds has now been identified, and Epic has acknowledged that they aren’t supposed to be playing as frequently as they currently are. It turns out the noises have been baffling PC gamers for a little while now, with some going to drastic measures to try and resolve the issue, including formatting their PC.

Epic Games Launcher has new sounds that play in the background

Fortnite insider FireMonkey investigated the issue after experiencing the same problem for around a week. According to them, the sounds are coming from the Epic Games Launcher’s social and party features, with different chimes being used for different actions. These include a user joining or leaving a party, receiving a party message, changing party joinability, and activating or deactivating push-to-talk.

The problem is that these actions can happen in the background, meaning the sound may play while you’re using another program or doing something completely unrelated. Without any obvious notification appearing on the screen, it can sound like the PC itself is randomly making noises, which explains why some users had difficulty tracking down the source.

Epic has now confirmed that something isn’t working as expected. The official Fortnite Status account responded to FireMonkey’s findings and explained that the party chimes are being triggered more frequently than the company intended.

Epic is currently updating the launcher to reduce the number of situations in which these sounds are played. That should hopefully make the random chimes much less common, although it doesn’t appear that the company is removing them completely.

Some users would rather have more control over the feature instead. Following Epic’s response, players have asked the company to add an option that allows party and social notification sounds to be completely disabled. At the moment, Epic has only confirmed that it is narrowing down the events that trigger them.

FireMonkey also mentioned that the individual audio files responsible for the sounds can be deleted, which could provide a temporary workaround for those who find them particularly annoying. However, this isn’t necessarily a permanent solution, as a future Epic Games Launcher update could simply restore the missing files.

About the Author

Abdul Haddi

Abdul is a tech writer and Editor for PC Guide, specializing in all things tech, gaming, and hardware.