Myco is a menu bar app that streams macOS audio to multiple output devices at the same time, and mixes multiple microphones into one input device. Each output has its own volume, delay, buffer size and ten-band EQ.
The motivation was comfortable gaming for me and a comfortable watching experience for my wife. On a call with friends, microphone echo becomes a real problem, and the best fix is headphones, so echo never appears. But with headphones on, my wife cannot hear the game audio, and that is no fun.
The first solution was a macOS aggregate device from Audio MIDI Setup, but it is neither ergonomic nor easy to use. I also tried PolySound, but it rebuilds the aggregate device on every AirPods reconnect, which makes Wine lose track of where to send audio, and taking the AirPods off means reloading the whole game for it to find everything again.
The other problem Myco solves is mic monitoring. In isolating headphones I hear my friends on the call but not my wife speaking next to me. Myco monitors my microphone inputs, so I hear everything said around me.
To achieve all of this, Myco publishes two virtual devices through its own audio driver and does the routing itself, so devices never disappear and the game never notices a change when you tweak your audio setup.
- Many outputs at once. Turn on any set of devices; each gets a volume, a delay, a buffer size and an EQ of its own. The EQ panel carries the AutoEq correction for thousands of headphones, picked by name, and fits one on the spot from any measurement on squig.link. A headphone measured at several volumes, AirPods for one, gets a correction that follows the volume slider. The master slider moves each device's own volume, and a volume changed on the device, from an AirPods stem for example, moves the master.
- Aligned outputs. One switch delays every output to the slowest one, so speakers and headphones stay in time for pleasant media watching experience.
- One microphone from many. Turn on the microphones you want, set each gain, and every app sees one input device so nothing has to reconnect or reload on the fly. The microphones open only while an app listens, so the orange indicator means what it does with a real microphone.
- Monitoring. Hear a microphone in any output, with its own level.
- Profiles. Every device setting lives in a profile, such as Game or Watching, and one click on a chip, or a global shortcut, switches the whole set. A profile remembers devices that are not connected, so headphones that join later come on by themselves. Myco asks for Bluetooth access once, to show paired headphones by name while they are away.
- A fallback output. Mark one device, the built-in speakers say, to play while every enabled output is disconnected.
- Nothing changes under the apps. The virtual devices keep their rate and their identity while physical devices come and go.
Requires macOS 14 or later.
- Download Myco.zip, unzip it and move
Myco.appto/Applications. - The download is not notarized, so remove the quarantine flag once:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Myco.app - Open Myco from the menu bar and click Install. macOS asks for an administrator password because the driver goes into
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL. - Turn on the outputs you want to hear.
Remove driver in the menu bar icon's right-click menu takes the driver out again.
Requires Xcode 16 or later. There is no Xcode project.
make build # dist/Myco.app with the driver inside
make install # copies the driver into place (administrator prompt)
swift test --filter "MycoDSPTests|MycoTests" # the sample maths and the app rules, no hardware needed
make test-capture # everything; needs the driver installed and a microphone
ARCHITECTURE.md explains the driver, the shared-memory feed and the engine. DESIGN.md is the visual design guide.
Headphone presets come from AutoEq by Jaakko Pasanen (MIT), refreshed with make autoeq, for the rigs that publish nowhere else, and from the measurers who publish on squig.link, read live when the picker opens.