Mic Drop: the beloved mic muting Mac app, better than ever

Happy World 🐙 Day!

To celebrate our eight-tentacled-friends, we’ve released a brand-new Mic Drop 2.0! 🥳

It’s our biggest, most feature-packed update ever, and it’s going to make all your meetings a million times better. Check out everything that’s new:

• 🔔 Audio notifications
• 🔴 New menu bar icons
• ✅ Mic Check
• 🎹 New keyboard shortcuts
• 🤖 Scriptability and automations
• ⚡️ Rapid device switching
• 🤐 Disable devices
• 🌟 Improved performance and reliability

🔔 Audio notifications

Lots of you wrote in asking for audio notifications. You can now select one of several different sounds to play when you toggle the mic:

Did Sarah spend time hand-selecting the correct fart noise? No comment.

You can combine visual and audio notifications, so you always know when you’re muted.

🔴 New menu bar icons

We’ve added three brand new icons for your menu bar, in both colour and grayscale options:

We’ve also fine-tuned the appearance of the original icon and added error states, so you can easily see at a glance if you’re using a microphone that can’t be muted by macOS.

✅ Mic Check

We’ve totally redesigned the status window and renamed it Mic Check.

One of our primarily goals for Mic Drop is to ensure that you always know if you’re muted. The new Mic Check feature shows your microphone levels, mute state, and default microphone in real-time, so you know exactly what’s happening with your mic:

Resizing the window was awkward and hard to discover—you may not even know that was a feature! So instead, we’ve made the new Mic Check available in five different sizes, from tiny to huge. We’ve also added a close button, so you don’t have to go up to your menu bar to close it.

If you choose to give Mic Drop microphone access, you will also see a VU meter when you speak. We know some of your have complicated audio setups, and this should help to add an additional layer of assurance that you’re really, really muted when you think you are.

Of course, microphone audio access is totally optional, and if you don’t feel comfortable granting it, you just won’t see the real-time audio feedback. Mic Drop never records or listens to you (check out our Privacy Policy).

🎹 New keyboard shortcuts

In addition to your primary keyboard shortcut, we’ve added shortcuts for toggling the push-to-talk mode, toggling Mic Check, mute only, and unmute only:

🤖 Scriptability and automations

Mic Drop now supports AppleScript, which means it can be controlled from the command-line (by running AppleScript commands) or from the Shortcuts app:

For users who want to script Mic Drop, we provide several commands. There’s more info on our Automation & Scripting help page.

⚡️ Rapid device switching

We’ve added the ability to switch your current input device directly from the menu bar:

You’ll also see any devices Mic Drop can’t mute in this list. You can select them, but note that Mic Drop won’t be able to mute them.

🤐 Disable devices

You can now select which devices you’d like Mic Drop to control. If there’s a device we shouldn’t ever mute, just toggle it from the settings and we’ll ignore it:

This is a bit of an advanced feature, but some users with complex audio setups have been asking for this for some time, and we hope it works for you!

🌟 Improved performance and reliability

We know Mic Drop has sometimes led to high CPU usage, especially when used alongside the “Share System Audio” features found in apps like MS Teams or Zoom. We’ve rewritten the audio engine so it’s more performant and more reliable. CPU spikes should be a thing of the past!

We hope you ❤️ it!

We’ve put a ton of love and attention into this release, and we’re really excited to hear what you think. If you’re on Product Hunt, please share your feedback there, or you can drop us a line at any time.

If you haven’t already, check out Mic Drop on the Mac App Store.

Happy muting!