Obra Volume Control

The keys you already press

There is nothing to learn and nothing to rebind. These are the keys already printed on your keyboard, and holding ⌥ while you press volume up or down moves the level by the smaller step. Everything else on the top row is left alone.

Back in the centre

On macOS Tahoe the system volume indicator sits in the top right, beside the menu bar, away from whatever you were looking at. Obra Volume Control draws its own indicator in the middle of the screen instead.

It does not watch the volume keys from the side — it takes them. When you press one, the app sets the output level itself and consumes the key, so macOS never sees the press and never puts its own indicator on screen. An app that only added a second indicator would leave you with two, which is worse than the one you started with.

The level is written to the default output device. Some devices expose no master control; on those the left and right channels are scaled around the louder one, so a stereo balance you have set by hand survives being turned up and down.

Three indicators

The speaker glyph keeps one fixed width at every level. Swapping between one, two and three wave bars changes the glyph's width, which makes the icon jump sideways each time the level crosses a threshold — in the centre of the screen you notice that. Show Volume in the menu bar item, or Preview volume indicator in Settings, shows the current treatment at the current level without changing anything.

Two step sizes rather than one. A 6% step gets you across the range in a few presses, which is what you want most of the time; hold ⌥ for the times it is too coarse. Size and duration matter more in the centre than they did in a corner: the panel is now sitting on your work.

On first launch

macOS only lets an app take the media keys once you allow it in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility. Obra Volume Control asks the first time you run it, and the menu bar item keeps a Grant Accessibility Access… command for later. Until you grant it, the app can do nothing at all: the keys go straight to macOS and the indicator stays in the top right. That grant is the only permission it ever needs — it has no network access and stores nothing but your settings.

Details