I think you should be able to disable notification sounds on pretty much any distro and desktop environment out there. For example I use Fedora with KDE and you can just open up System Sounds and uncheck “Enable Notification Sounds” and it’ll just be quiet.
As for waking up from sleep randomly, I never noticed it wake from sleep randomly. I vaguely remember it doing that when I had Windows installed on it a few times.
yt-dlp is what i normally use, tho its only got a command line interface. I think someone’s made a GUI for it, but I’ve never tried it.