Audiout lives in your menu bar. The icon isn’t just a button: it shows what the app is doing at a glance. This article covers the icon, the panel behind it, and the right-click menu.
Reading the icon
The icon is a speaker symbol. Its waves fill with your master volume, so a glance tells you how loud the house is.
- Outline: Audiout is running but idle. Nothing is streaming.
- Filled: audio is streaming to your speakers.
- Waves drained: you’re muted.
- Warning badge: a speaker you selected has failed. Open the panel to see which one and why.
Opening the panel
Left-click the icon and the panel opens. It has four tabs:
- Mixer: every speaker with its own fader, plus the master volume.
- Scenes: your saved speaker sets, one click to bring one back.
- Speakers: every speaker Audiout knows about, each with a page for its equalizer and for whether the Mixer shows it. See Hide or show a speaker in the Mixer.
- Settings: everything you can configure.
Switch tabs with ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3, and ⌘4.
The panel closes when you click elsewhere, like most menu bar apps.
Pinning the panel
Sometimes you want it to stay open, like when you’re nudging faders while a film plays. Click the Pin button at the top right and the panel becomes a normal window: drag it anywhere, leave it open, and it stays until you unpin it. Unpinning sends it back to the menu bar.
The right-click menu
Right-click the icon for a shorter menu:
- Settings (⌘,)
- Scenes
- Speakers
- About Audiout
- “Check for Updates…”: appears in paid builds
- Quit Audiout (⌘Q)
This is the quickest route to Settings or to a saved scene when you don’t need the full panel.
“Move to Applications” alert
If you launch Audiout straight from your Downloads folder or from the disk image, an alert explains that the app should be moved to your Applications folder. Do that: apps run from Downloads or a disk image can lose their permissions or their saved settings when macOS cleans up. Drag Audiout.app into Applications and open it from there.
If the icon isn’t in the menu bar
macOS hides menu bar icons when the bar runs out of room, which happens fast on a MacBook with a notch. Quit some other menu bar apps, or use a menu bar manager, and Audiout’s icon comes back. If Audiout isn’t running at all, open it from Applications.
More questions? Browse the rest of the support articles or contact us.