Your hand always wins
Pick a device yourself and automation stands down — for five minutes, thirty, an hour, until your devices change, or until you quit. Your choice is not a suggestion.
No permissions to switch devices
AirPods in a drawer
AirPods in a drawer
shouldn’t win.
Set your output order once. Tunestack quietly keeps audio on the highest-priority device that is actually connected.
0permissions
2.7 MBon disk
~0%idle CPU
The rule
macOS has exactly one rule
macOS has exactly one rule
for choosing your speakers.
Whatever connected most recently wins.
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01
AirPods wake in a drawer and steal audio from good speakers.
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02
A monitor’s USB connection hijacks output to tinny built-in speakers.
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03
Unplugging headphones blasts sound out of laptop speakers in a quiet room.
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04
Meeting apps grab the wrong microphone, and everyone says you sound far away.
macOS’s single automatic switching toggle doesn’t fix this — it is this behaviour.
Two Macs, one event stream
You can’t screenshot a behaviour.
You can’t screenshot a behaviour.
So here it is, running.
Below are two Macs. They receive identical events. The left one follows macOS’s rule; the right one follows yours. Unplug something and watch them disagree — this is the real rule engine, debounce, override and all.
Restraint
An automatic switcher is only good
An automatic switcher is only good
if it knows when to stop.
The fastest way to make someone uninstall a utility is to overrule them. Most of Tunestack’s engineering went into the moments it deliberately does nothing.
It stops itself
More than three switches in ten seconds and Tunestack pauses, changes its menu bar glyph, and waits for you. A possessed audio switcher is worse than no switcher.
It tells you why
Every decision carries a reason — including the ones that changed nothing. “Already on highest-priority device.” “Manual override active.” “Why didn’t it switch?” is always answerable.
Under the hood
Small, quiet, and nobody’s business but yours.
- Permission prompts
- None to switch
- Idle CPU
- ~0%
- App size
- 2.7 MB
- Network calls
- None
Switching audio devices needs no permission on macOS, so the part you use every day never asks for anything. Only the optional per-app levels feature does, and only when you turn it on.
Event-driven, never polling. An hour of idle observation measured 0.03 seconds of CPU and zero spurious wake-ups.
Native Swift 6 under strict concurrency. No Electron, no bundled runtime — one binary and an icon.
No telemetry, no analytics, no account. Your settings are one local JSON file, written atomically.
Plainly
What Tunestack can’t do.
This category is full of utilities that promise more than the operating system allows. Here is the honest edge of what’s possible, before you spend $8.99.
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It can’t stop another app from taking a device.
An app that opens its own audio session and demands a specific device gets it. Tunestack sits above that layer — it can notice and switch back, which it will do if you ask it to, but it cannot prevent the grab. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling you something.
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It isn’t instant.
It’s fast — under half a second — but there’s a deliberate 300 ms pause first. Real hardware fires several notifications per physical plug, and reacting to each one makes a switcher that flaps.
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Tested on macOS 26 and Apple silicon.
Tunestack is built as a universal binary and runs on macOS 14.4 or later, Intel or Apple silicon — that is what the App Store will sell you. But testing so far has been on macOS 26 on Apple silicon, so that is where it is known good. Avoid macOS 26.0 specifically: it shipped real audio bugs of its own, fixed in 26.1.
The trade
Right now you fix this by hand. You notice the sound is wrong, you stop what you were doing, you open the menu, you pick the right thing. Several times a day, every day, for as long as you own the Mac.
$8.99once
And then you stop thinking about audio.
- One payment, never a subscription
- Version 1.0 and every update after it
- No account, no tracking
- Every Mac on your Apple Account
There is no trial to install, because you do not need one. The simulator further up this page runs the same rule engine the app does — the same debounce, the same override, the same loop breaker. Watch it behave before you spend anything.
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
What permissions does it need?
None to switch devices. Listing audio devices, reading which one is in use, and changing it are all considered harmless by macOS — no prompt, no entitlement, no System Settings pane. Per-app audio is the only part that asks, and macOS prompts you the moment you turn it on.
Doesn’t macOS already have automatic switching?
It has one toggle, and that toggle is most-recent-wins. It has no notion of which device you prefer. Apple still hasn’t shipped priority switching — verified as recently as macOS 26.6. How macOS actually chooses your audio device goes through the rule in full.
Will it fight me when I pick a device by hand?
No. A manual choice suspends automatic switching for as long as you tell it to — thirty minutes by default. And if it ever switches more than three times in ten seconds it stops entirely and waits, rather than thrashing your audio.
I can’t see the icon in my menu bar.
Check System Settings ▸ Control Centre ▸ Menu Bar — macOS can hide status items when the bar runs out of room, particularly on a laptop with a notch. Tunestack has no Dock icon and no window by design, so the menu bar is the whole app.
Does it work with AirPlay speakers?
Unknown, honestly. AirPlay devices may not appear to the audio layer the same way wired and Bluetooth devices do, and it hasn’t been verified — so it isn’t claimed. If AirPlay is the only reason you would buy Tunestack, wait until it is.