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 required
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.
-
01
AirPods wake in a drawer and steal audio from good speakers.
-
02
A monitor’s USB connection hijacks output to tinny built-in speakers.
-
03
Unplugging headphones blasts sound out of laptop speakers in a quiet room.
-
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
- Zero
- Idle CPU
- ~0%
- App size
- 2.7 MB
- Network calls
- None
Switching audio devices needs no permission on macOS. Tunestack’s entire core ships without ever asking you for anything.
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 $19.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Apple silicon and macOS 26.1 or later. For now.
That’s what has actually been tested, so that’s what’s claimed. macOS 26.0 shipped real audio bugs of its own. Older systems and Intel Macs are on the list, not in the box.
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.
$19once
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 you own
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.
Why doesn’t it ask for any permissions?
Because it doesn’t need to. 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.
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.