Soundary vs ToothFairy and AirBuddy

I built Soundary because of a small, dumb thing that happened to me almost every day. My AirPods connect, music starts playing through them, then a call comes to the front and my Mac sends the audio somewhere I did not ask for. So I pull the AirPods out, the audio scrambles to a random device, and I am clicking through the sound menu again. The connecting part was never my problem. What happened after the connect was.

That distinction is the whole reason this post exists. People searching for Bluetooth audio switching on a Mac usually land on three names: ToothFairy, AirBuddy, and now Soundary. They sound like competitors. They mostly are not. Two of them get your headphones connected. One of them decides what your audio does once they are.

ToothFairy and AirBuddy are connection tools, and good ones

Let me be fair before I draw any lines, because both apps are genuinely well made and I am not here to strawman them.

ToothFairy by C-Command Software is a 6.99 dollar one-time purchase on the Mac App Store. Its job is to connect and disconnect one chosen Bluetooth device with a click or a hotkey. It gives that device its own menu-bar icon, shows battery, can force the higher-quality AAC codec, and can even run a shell script or AppleScript when the device connects or disconnects. That last part matters and I will come back to it. But at its core, ToothFairy is a per-device connection toggle. It is not a system-default switcher and it has no rules engine.

AirBuddy by Gui Rambo is roughly 10 to 13 dollars one-time (the exact number sits behind a buy button), sold direct rather than on the App Store. It brings iOS-style AirPods integration to the Mac: the open-case proximity popover, one-click connect-and-play, battery across your Apple devices, Shortcuts support, Magic Handoff between Macs, and per-device connection profiles that set output, input, and volume on connect. It is a lovely piece of work. But its auto-switching largely surfaces Apple's own AirPods handoff, and what it does is device-specific connect-and-route, not a general rules engine over arbitrary devices.

And Apple's native AirPods handoff? It is automatic, and it often fires exactly when you do not want it. That is the itch all of us are scratching.

Soundary is a context switcher, not a connector

Soundary does not connect your AirPods. It assumes they are connected (by Apple, by ToothFairy, by AirBuddy, by you) and then it decides what wins.

The decision is made by a real rules engine. You describe the context and Soundary acts on it: which app is in front, whether the mic is in use, a device connecting or disconnecting, and time of day. Rules have priority, so conflicts resolve sanely. There is a manual-override cooldown, so when you switch by hand the engine backs off instead of fighting you. There is an anti-loop guard. It re-evaluates when your Mac wakes from sleep.

On top of that sit three things the connection tools do not try to do:

Scenes. Bundle an output, an input, and per-device volumes into one named mode. "Meeting" sends sound to your headphones, mic to your good interface, at the levels you like. "Movie" is something else entirely. One pick.

Per-device volume memory. Each device remembers its own level, so a switch never blasts you at full volume because the last device was quiet.

Smart disconnect fallback. This is the yank the headphones out moment. When a device drops, Soundary falls back to the device you actually want, not whatever macOS grabs first.

It works across every device: wired, virtual, and Bluetooth. That is the part a single-device connection tool cannot reach by design.

The honest table

Here is the side by side. I have tried to keep it accurate rather than flattering.

A fair callout: ToothFairy's connect and disconnect scripts are a real DIY automation path. If you are comfortable writing a script, you can make a lot happen there. But it is still anchored to one device and triggered by that one device's connection. It is not a rules engine weighing app focus against mic state against time of day. Different tool, different shape.

What I am not claiming

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to oversell. Soundary is not the only thing on your Mac that auto-switches. macOS already switches on device presence. Some small tools reorder devices by priority when something connects. So if your need is one tap to connect my AirPods, with battery and a codec nudge, ToothFairy is excellent. If your life is AirPods-centric and you want that polished Apple-style proximity experience, AirBuddy is excellent. Soundary does not replace either of them, and I would not pretend it does.

Soundary's edge is narrow and specific: contextual rules, Scenes, volume memory, and a sane fallback, built as a focused, App-Store-grade product for exactly this and nothing else. On purpose it does not do per-app volume or routing or EQ. That is SoundSource territory, and it is also why Soundary fits the sandbox and stays private. Nothing leaves your Mac.

Most people will run two of these

Honestly, the cleanest setup for a lot of people is two apps. Let ToothFairy or AirBuddy own the connect, the one tap, the battery, the codec. Let Soundary own what happens next: the rules, the Scenes, the fallback when something drops.

Soundary is a one-time 4.99 dollar purchase coming to the Mac App Store, no subscription and no account. If the call comes to the front and the audio goes wrong moment is yours too, it might be the second half of the setup you already have.