Interactive simulation: toggle the microphone or camera to see Do Not Disturb activate and deactivate in real time.
How it works
Microphone detection
Uses CoreAudio's device activity signal — the same one that lights the orange indicator in your menu bar. Sees every app.
Camera detection
Watches every connected camera simultaneously. Built-in, Continuity, external. Zoom, FaceTime, Meet, Teams — all of them.
Zero configuration
Lives in your menu bar. No account, no cloud, no subscription. Onboard in 30 seconds and forget it exists.
"I built Mute because I kept getting distracted by notifications mid-meeting — a Slack ping, an email badge, right when I needed to focus. I wanted something that just handled it, without me thinking about it."
FAQ
Focus mode requires manual activation — you have to remember to turn it on before a call and off after. This means you either forget entirely, or forget to turn it off and miss messages after the call ends. Mute reads the CoreAudio signal the moment any app touches your mic or camera and handles Do Not Disturb automatically, with no shortcuts or schedules needed. It also works for unplanned calls: if someone rings you on FaceTime unexpectedly, Mute activates before you even realize a call started. Unlike Focus mode filters, Mute does not require you to configure which apps are allowed through — it silences everything while you are on a call, then restores your normal notification settings the moment you hang up.
Mute requires microphone and camera access — the same two permissions any video conferencing app requests. The microphone permission allows Mute to observe the CoreAudio signal that drives the orange indicator in your macOS menu bar. The camera permission allows Mute to observe whether any camera is currently in use by another app. In both cases, Mute reads a system-level activity signal, not actual audio or video data. It does not record, stream, or process any sound or image. No internet connection is used, and no data ever leaves your Mac. You can verify this by inspecting the open-source code on GitHub.
Yes — and with any app that activates your microphone or camera, not a fixed list. Mute reads a system-level signal from CoreAudio and AVCaptureDevice rather than integrating with individual apps, so it works with Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, FaceTime, Slack huddles, Discord, WebEx, and any browser-based conferencing tool automatically. Apps released after Mute was installed work too, with no update needed. You can also configure Mute to respond only to camera activity if you want to narrow the trigger to video calls specifically.
The microphone permission on macOS gates access to CoreAudio device information, not just audio capture. Mute uses it to observe the kAudioDevicePropertyDeviceIsRunningSomewhere property — the same signal that lights the orange mic indicator in your menu bar when any app uses your microphone. Without this permission, a sandboxed app cannot read this property. Mute never opens an audio stream, never reads audio samples, and never stores or transmits any sound. The permission is required by the macOS sandbox model to access device activity information, even for passive observation only.
No measurable impact. The CoreAudio listener uses a property callback that fires only when the mic state changes — not continuous polling. The camera observer uses KVO on isInUseByAnotherApplication, which is similarly event-driven. A lightweight timer runs every two seconds as a reliability fallback, but it does nothing more than read two boolean values. Mute is a passive observer with no background network activity, and it contributes nothing meaningful to battery drain in daily use.
Yes. Mute monitors the default audio input device on your Mac, which updates automatically when you switch input sources. If you connect AirPods and macOS sets them as the default input, Mute follows automatically. The same applies to USB microphones, audio interfaces, and any input device macOS recognizes as the system default.
