In this article, we are looking at how we can use Sonarworks to manage Mac System audio output, the default output from macOS, not just the system sounds, but any applications that produce sound but don’t have their own audio device control panel.

Logic Pro - An Example Of A Mac Application That Does Have Its Own Sound Options

When we use our DAW’s we often have preference pages to specify where the audio inputs and outputs are sourced from, such as this preference pane from Logic Pro X…

Sound Studio - An Example Of A Mac Application That Does Not Have Its Own Sound Options

Not all applications have their own sound options built-in. For instance there is a great little stereo sample editor application called Sound Studio that doesn’t have this. The outputs for applications like Sound Studio are controlled from the macOS Audio MIDI Setup, but this extends to applications such as Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, or even the audio from your web browser (YouTube etc).

As some of you may know, the macOS has a slightly odd quirk where if you are using anything other than the internal Mac output (such as the internal speakers on a MacBook Pro/iMac or the speakers in my recently purchased Mac Pro) as your main system output, it is impossible to control the volume using the keyboard.

Pressing the volume up/down or mute on the keyboard doesn’t do anything.

You can see in this screenshot that I am using my Grace M905 Monitor Controller for macOS audio output, but by doing this means that I lose the use of those Mac keyboard keys when the Grace monitor controller is selected. It is not just the Grace that is affected, it is the same for any device that isn’t the inbuilt audio device of your Mac.

I don’t know about you but I usually want to hear this audio through my studio monitors but I also want to be able to control the mute/volume using the F10, F11 and F12 keys. I’ve never understood why macOS limits the use of these buttons to only the inbuilt audio device, one which doesn’t usually have close to the audio performance of our dedicated, professional-quality audio interfaces.

A Workaround

It isn’t the end of the world but I have always found it to be a slight irritation and consequently had always set my Mac’s system output to go out of the default output and then either auxed them into the audio interface I was using or patched into a monitor controller than can monitor more than one source at once, which is a feature you don’t find on many of the high-end monitor controllers as it can compromise audio performance.

So that is the problem and here is the solution to how we control system level volume when we want to use an output other than the inbuilt Mac audio output.

A Solution

I stumbled upon a better solution when I was working abroad for a time, in a room that was not an ideal acoustical environment. A colleague suggested that I use Sonarworks to mitigate some of the acoustical issues I was experiencing in the room, which it does a great job of doing (as you would expect as it is its main selling point).

One additional benefit of the Sonarworks Systemwide software is that when it is active you can route audio to and from different devices whilst still being able to use the Mac keyboard keys for volume up/down/mute controls, as you can see from this screenshot…

I should point out that this doesn’t give you Mac keyboard volume control of Pro Tools or Logic, or any other application that has its own preference pane for audio IO. But it does enable me to control the volume of anything that goes through the Audio MIDI Setup window.

I find it particularly handy to use when tracking in the control room because I can mute the Mac system audio output so that takes aren’t spoiled if an email comes in or some other system-level alert occurs.