Move sounds

Three kinds of sound set, chosen in Settings → Sound → Move sounds.

The same sound settings apply to every moving chess board: analysis, the opening explorer’s Collection tree and Reference databases, computer play, repertoire drills, and blindfold exercises. Mouse moves, keyboard moves and automatic replies all use the shared board sound player. Captures, checks, castling, promotion and checkmate use their corresponding event; backward navigation and jumps use one move sound. Initial board setup and repeated redraws are silent. Volume, disabled events and the Off sound set are respected everywhere.

Bundled sample sets

The lichess sound sets ship with the app: standard, piano, sfx, futuristic, NES, lisp, robot and woodland. Choose one and it works — there are no files to supply.

Fetch or refresh them with:

py tools\fetch_sounds.py
py tools\fetch_sounds.py --only piano standard

Twelve events get a sound: game start, your move, opponent move, capture, castling, check, promotion, game end, illegal move, notification, low time, and pre-move.

No set covers all twelve — lichess plays nothing for check or checkmate in its standard set, and ships no castling sample anywhere. A missing sample is borrowed: from your chosen set, then from lichess standard, then from any installed set that has one, and only then from the synthesized preset. The settings row says which set a borrowed sound came from.

The chess.com set

chess.com’s audio is proprietary and is not redistributed here. Fetch it for your own machine:

py tools\fetch_sounds.py --chesscom

It lands in assets/sound/chesscom/, which .gitignore keeps out of the repository and which the build spec strips out of any executable. Once fetched, it appears in the sound set dropdown like any other. It is the only set with a genuine sample for all twelve events, including castling and pre-move.

Caissa presets

Caissa wood and Caissa digital are synthesized with an oscillator. They need no files, work in any build, and are the safe default. You can still attach your own audio file to an individual event while using them.

Your own files

My own audio files takes a file per event, up to 1 MB each, stored as data URLs in your library preferences so they travel with the library.

Credits

Every bundled set’s author and licence is recorded in assets/sound/CREDITS.md, taken from lila’s own COPYING.md. The sets by Enigmahack and the lila authors are AGPLv3+; the lisp set is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.