mactooloud
The per-app volume mixer macOS forgot to ship
Details
- External ID
- 1199352
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- mactooloud
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- Sept. 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9330233055377378
- Tags
- Mac, Menu Bar Apps, Audio
- Fetched at
- Sept. 25, 2026, 1:01 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 25, 2026, 1:01 a.m.
Description
macOS gives you one volume knob for your whole Mac. mactooloud gives every app its own. Pull Chrome to 20% without touching Spotify. Auto-Duck fades music the moment Zoom or Slack grabs the mic, then restores it when you hang up. Mystery Sound Finder catches whatever is making that noise, even in another Space. Focus blocks mute everything but your one lo-fi app. Native menu-bar app - no audio driver, no kernel extension, no virtual device. macOS 14.4+, Universal, 7-day free trial.
Enrichment
- Theme
- custom keyboards and input controllers
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- per-app volume mixer for macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No macOS lacks public per-app volume APIs, necessitating deep low-level audio engineering with CoreAudio HAL plugins, virtual audio drivers, or Audio Server Plugins.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a native Swift/C++ macOS application interfacing with a custom CoreAudio Audio Server Plugin (HAL driver) or kernel/driver extension to intercept and manipulate audio streams on a per-process PID basis. The hardest aspects are managing low-latency buffer manipulation, reverse-engineering or reliably intercepting proprietary audio graphs without kernel panics, and passing strict Apple notarization/sandbox hurdles for low-level audio drivers.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 437 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #55 of 438 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 311 days after the earliest competitor.
- SOUND · ph · 2026-09-26 · 101 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- SoundsMac · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Volura · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Keybit · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- I wrote a macOS C++ audio driver to fix HDMI volume controls · hn · 2026-03-18 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- MicShield · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Orbit · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- TongueType · hn · 2026-05-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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