The 5 best Mac sound apps in 2026

My Mac's audio is run by a handful of little menu-bar icons and a fair amount of hope. One handles volume per app. One forces my headphones to connect. One nudges the EQ when something sounds thin. And one, full disclosure, is mine.

That last detail matters, so let me get it out of the way early: I build Soundary, which is on this list. I have tried to be fair to everything else here, partly because most of these apps are genuinely excellent, and partly because they solve different problems than mine does. There is no single "best Mac sound app." There is only the best one for the specific thing that is annoying you today.

So here are five worth your menu bar in 2026, sorted by the problem each one fixes.

1. SoundSource, a mixing desk in your menu bar

If you have ever wanted Spotify at 40 percent while Zoom stays at full volume, SoundSource is the answer. Rogue Amoeba's menu-bar utility gives every app its own volume and, more impressively, its own output. You can send Slack alerts to your laptop speakers while music stays on your headphones, drop an equalizer or an Audio Unit effect onto any app, and adjust each device without ever opening System Settings.

It is a deep, serious tool, and it is priced like one: $49 as a one-time purchase, sold directly rather than on the App Store. There is a "Preferred Device Order" that picks a default when devices connect, but routing is the heart of it, and routing is something you set up by hand.

Best for: per-app volume and output routing.

2. Audio Hijack, for capturing anything

Audio Hijack is the app you reach for when you need to record. Anything. The output of a single app, your microphone, a whole call, or the entire system at once. It is the backbone of a lot of podcasts for good reason: you wire up a little block diagram of sources and effects, hit record, and get clean files out the other end, with live streaming and on-device transcription along the way.

Also from Rogue Amoeba, it is $69 one-time. If your problem is routing audio between apps rather than recording it, its sibling Loopback ($99) builds virtual devices for exactly that. Neither one switches your output for you, because that is not what they are for.

Best for: recording and capturing audio.

3. eqMac, for fixing the sound itself

Sometimes the device is right and the sound is just wrong. Thin laptop speakers, boomy headphones, a podcast that is all treble. eqMac is a system-wide equalizer that lives in the menu bar, with a generous free tier and thousands of headphone presets. Its Pro features add a per-app volume mixer and effect hosting.

The pricing is unusually flexible: free to start, then $3 a month, $30 a year, or a $40 lifetime license if you would rather pay once. It is the easiest way to make your existing setup sound better, and it pairs nicely with anything else on this list.

Best for: a free, system-wide EQ.

4. ToothFairy, for taming Bluetooth

Bluetooth on the Mac has one specific, recurring indignity: you click the menu bar, wait, hunt for your AirPods, click again, and hope. ToothFairy turns that into a single click or a keyboard shortcut. You get a dedicated menu-bar icon for your headphones, their battery level, and a quiet but real bonus: it can force the higher-quality AAC codec instead of the garbled "phone call" sound Macs sometimes fall back to.

It is $6.99 once, on the Mac App Store, from C-Command Software. If you live deeper in Apple's ecosystem, AirBuddy (roughly $10 to $13, sold direct) does a richer job with proximity popovers and battery across all your devices. Both are about connecting a device, though, not about choosing which device should be active in a given moment.

Best for: one-click Bluetooth connection.

5. Soundary, for switching that just happens

Which brings me to the gap I built Soundary to fill. Every app above is something you operate. Soundary is something you teach once and then forget. You describe a few situations, and it handles the switch: your headset and mic take over when a call comes to the front, the right input steps in when something starts recording, audio follows your AirPods when they connect and falls back sensibly when you unplug, and evenings can land on your speakers on their own.

It rounds that out with Scenes (an output, an input, and volumes bundled into one named mode), per-device volume memory so a switch never blasts you, and a Liquid Glass edge dock for switching by hand when you want to. It stays in the menu bar, nothing leaves your Mac, and it is a one-time $4.99 purchase coming to the Mac App Store.

I want to be honest about the boundary, because it is the whole point: Soundary deliberately does not do per-app routing or EQ. That is SoundSource's job, and it does it better than a side feature ever could. macOS already switches on its own when you plug something in, sometimes to the wrong thing, and a few small tools will reorder your devices by priority. What none of them quite do is let you say "in this situation, use that device," which is the part I cared about.

Best for: automatic, context-aware switching.

The quick cheat sheet

So which one do you actually need?

Probably more than one, and that is fine, because they stack rather than compete. SoundSource and Soundary happily run side by side: one decides how loud each app is, the other decides which device they all land on. Add eqMac if the sound needs shaping, and ToothFairy if Bluetooth is your daily friction.

Start with whichever annoyance is loudest right now. For me it was the constant manual switching, so that is the one I went and built. If it is the annoyance nagging you too, that is the lane Soundary is parked in.