Smart audio coordination for Windows. AudioFocus automatically manages your music and videos so you never have to manually pause one app to hear another.
Windows is great, but it has one annoying flaw: it lets every app play sound at the same time. If you're listening to Spotify and click a YouTube link, both will blast audio at you until you manually pause one.
AudioFocus fixes this. It works in the background to ensure only one "active" app is playing at a time.
- Auto-Pause: Start a video in VLC or Edge, and your background Spotify music pauses instantly.
- Smart Hand-back: Close a temporary video or clip, and your music automatically resumes where you left off.
- Set & Forget: No complex setup. Just run it, and it lives silently in your system tray.
- Native Experience: Built specifically for Windows 10 and 11 using high-performance, lightweight technology.
- Download: Grab the latest
audiofocus.exe. - Run: Double-click the file. You'll see a small notification and a headphone icon in your system tray.
- Enjoy: Start playing any audio. The app handles the rest!
- Active: Toggle this to temporarily disable automatic pausing.
- Auto-Resume Recently Paused: If enabled (default), your music will come back to life when you stop watching other videos (within 5 minutes).
- Restart: Refreshes all background services if Windows audio acting up.
- Open Logs Folder: See exactly how the app is making decisions.
- Ultra Lightweight: Uses almost zero CPU (0.1% or less) and very little memory (<15MB).
- Privacy First: No internet connection required. No data is ever sent to the cloud. All coordination happens locally on your PC.
- Stability: Built-in "Self-Healing" logic detects if Windows audio drivers crash and automatically reconnects to keep things running smoothly.
AudioFocus is a professional-grade Rust application that bridges the gap between modern WinRT APIs and legacy Win32 systems:
- Universal Monitoring: Combines SMTC (modern apps) and WASAPI (legacy apps) into a single event stream.
- Identity Tracking: Uses process creation timestamps to uniquely identify apps, preventing "ghost" sessions even if Windows reuses Process IDs.
- Arbitration Brain: A custom state machine with debouncing and loop-protection to prevent "pause-wars" between apps.
Requires Rust (Stable MSVC) and Windows 10/11 SDK.
cargo build --releaseMIT