SOUND

SOUND is a free macOS menu-bar app from CPL OF MNGS that gives every app on your Mac its own equalizer, volume control, and audio output destination. Its purpose is simple to state: per-app sound control, right from your menu bar — an equalizer, volume, and speaker for every app. Instead of relying on the single volume slider macOS provides, SOUND shows controls for every app that is currently playing audio, plus a System master that applies to everything you have not individually overridden. The app is built for people who want finer control over how each application sounds, whether they are listening to music, taking calls, watching video, or working in audio and video production tools. It lives in the menu bar, requires no account, and is free to download. macOS ships with one volume slider and no equalizer. That single control governs everything the Mac plays, which creates everyday friction: turning down a loud meeting also turns down the music you were enjoying, and there is no built-in way to boost the bass on one track or shape the tone of a specific application. The result of the default is that every adjustment is global — raising the volume for a quiet podcast raises it for everything else, and quieting one noisy source means adjusting the whole system. Many Mac equalizers try to solve this by installing a virtual audio driver and applying one curve to everything, which adds another piece to the Mac's audio stack and can require setup or a restart. SOUND addresses the same problem through a different route: it builds on the modern per-app audio engine inside macOS, so each app gets its own equalizer, volume, and output, nothing extra is added to the audio stack, and there is no audio driver to install. The first core capability is the per-app equalizer. SOUND provides an 8-band equalizer for every app that is playing sound, spanning 63 Hz to 8 kHz with a range of ±12 dB. That means you can shape the tone of a single application without changing anything else: add low end to one track, soften harsh high frequencies in another, or tune an app to suit your speakers or headphones. Band adjustments apply in real time — there is no audio driver setup and no restart. Alongside the per-app controls, a System master shapes everything you have not individually overridden. This makes SOUND usable as a system-wide equalizer for the Mac while still allowing per-app exceptions whenever you want them, so a global curve and individual app curves can coexist. The second capability group covers volume and routing. Volume, per app, means you can turn one app down without touching the others — useful when you want to quiet a single source rather than the whole machine, and it removes the need to race to mute a browser tab. Output control lets you route an app to the system output or pin it to a specific speaker, so music can play on the good speakers while calls stay in the headset. Routing matters because a Mac often has more than one output available at the same time, and SOUND's own examples show the intended use: music on the good speakers, calls in the headset. Together these two controls handle the common situation where different apps compete for attention at the same moment. A third group of features covers presets, visual feedback, and a global bypass. SOUND ships with starting presets — Flat, Bass Boost, Vocal, Podcast, and Bright — and you can save your own. Custom presets sync across your Macs via iCloud, so a curve you build on one machine travels with you to the others. A live spectrum glow and a BPM readout show what is playing in real time, and the display stays quiet when nothing musical is happening. Finally, one switch turns processing off entirely: flip it and every app plays untouched, with SOUND stepping aside completely. That gives you a fast way to compare processed and unprocessed sound or to return your Mac to its default behavior without quitting the app. Under the hood, SOUND uses real-time per-process audio taps with an 8-band peaking-filter cascade, processed with Apple's Accelerate framework. There are no virtual audio drivers and no kernel extensions. Because it is built on the modern per-app audio engine inside macOS, nothing new appears in Audio MIDI Setup, and when you quit SOUND your Mac's audio is exactly as it was. To shape the sound of other apps, macOS requires a one-time system audio capture permission; you grant it once through the standard system prompt, and SOUND only uses it to process audio in real time. The interface is native SwiftUI following the macOS Liquid Glass design language, and it includes accessibility fallbacks for Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. SOUND processes audio locally on your Mac, in real time. It does not record, store, or upload what you listen to, and there is no account to create — no email required, and no extra hardware needed. That privacy posture is the practical benefit of the local processing approach: your audio never leaves your Mac, so nothing you listen to is transmitted anywhere. Updates work the same low-friction way: SOUND ships signed, notarized builds that update themselves in the background, so you download once and stay current. When a new version is available you are asked once, and the update installs in the background without a return trip to the website. The product describes three concrete scenarios. Movie night: send the film to your good speakers while a call stays in your headset. Focus calls: turn one too-loud meeting down without touching your music. Everyday music: add the bass a track is missing, then save it as a preset. Beyond those, SOUND shows controls for every app that is currently playing audio, and its site lists music and streaming services, audio and video production tools, media players, communication apps, and browsers among the apps it works with. For anyone working in audio or video production, the same per-app controls apply to their creative tools rather than only to playback. SOUND is free to download and use, from the App Store or as a direct DMG, and it is available in 10 languages. It requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later, relying on modern system audio APIs and the current macOS design language, so earlier versions are not supported. There is no account and no extra hardware required. SOUND is built specifically for macOS, and there are no current plans for an iOS or Windows version. A changelog is published on the site for users who want to follow what changes between releases. SOUND takes the one volume slider macOS gives you and replaces it, per app, with an equalizer, an independent volume control, and a chosen output device — all from the menu bar. It does this without virtual audio drivers or kernel extensions, keeps audio processing local and account-free, and costs nothing. For Mac users who want each app to sound the way they want it to sound, SOUND is a direct, privacy-respecting answer to a long-standing limitation of the platform.