Exactly 21 years ago today, Rogue Amoeba shipped its very first product: Audio Hijack 1.0. In a small nod to our birthday, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at our app icons over the years. Below, I’ve lined up the icons for all the Mac apps Rogue Amoeba has sold since the beginning:

As you can see, our icons have changed quite a bit over two decades. This is due in part to shifts in broad design trends on the Mac, which we follow to some degree. It also reflects the reality of Rogue Amoeba having multiple designers over time. My own tenure here began in 2015, and several talented designers did icon work before me.

Early Rogue Amoeba icons, like Audio Hijack’s original audio thief and Nicecast’s satellite dish, were very detailed. This was a response to the then-massive 128×128 pixel canvas size of Mac OS X, which represented a huge size increase from the previous 32×32 icon size. Icons have recently grown even larger, up to 1024 pixels square on Retina screens. The original Macintosh’s entire screen was only 512×342, which means it couldn’t show even a quarter of a modern-day icon (and it would be in black and white to boot).

Check out this comparison of app icon sizes in 1984, 2002, and present day:

Over time, the excitement of being able to make photorealistic icons wore off, and Apple toned down their skeuomorphism. This led us to shift our icons to simpler shapes, which often include bolder colours.

Apple’s 2020 decision to switch the MacOS app icon standard to an iPhone-esque squircle shape also led to major changes. I’ve previously bemoaned the recent loss of distinct icon shapes, and Rogue Amoeba hasn’t followed Apple’s change rigidly. That said, we don’t want to clash with other app icons. We’ve updated many of our icon designs to fit in well on the Mac, while still maintaining some individuality.

In a way, this above image is more than just a timeline of icons, it’s a timeline of the apps themselves. Early on in Rogue Amoeba’s existence, there was a fair amount of churn in the product line. More recent years have been a lot more stable. I think this is a product of both our maturity as a company and of the Mac platform as a whole.

Earlier this spring, we shipped the second major version of Farrago. For this update, we really worked to improve every single facet of the product. The app remains extremely recognizable when compared with the first version, but from looks to features to ease of use, it’s better in every way.

As we have often done for major upgrades, I’d like go over many parts of our process, and discuss how we went about making all of these improvements and refinements.

Tiles

Let’s start with the most fundamental interface element Farrago has: sound tiles. They’re the foundational element of the app, with each tile representing one sound that’s available for playback. The functionality of tiles is largely unchanged in version 2, but visually, they’re greatly improved.

The update brings much better resizing to allow larger tiles when needed, as well as crisper colours and some small layout tweaks. The most obvious difference, however, is the new presence of emoji on the tile face.

From early on, we planned to include some sort of images on tiles. As a general rule of thumb, a combination of text and visual icon is easier for a user to identify quickly than just text or an icon alone. However, we weren’t sure how best to accomplish this. My earliest designs allowed any image file at all to be added to a tile, but we found that even with well-chosen images, the interface quickly got cluttered and hard to read.

Eventually, I came to another idea: emoji! Apple’s emoji are very well drawn, and even better, there’s a uniformity that makes all the emoji work well with each other. This made them a great choice to provide on-tile artwork. Farrago now allows for up to five icons to be added to each tile, so you can make combinations like 💥🚙 for car crash. These optional emoji add a really nice visual flair to the app, while feeling uniform and not overwhelming.

Now Playing LCD

The Now Playing LCD is the display at the top of Farrago’s main window, and it got a big overhaul. This space summarizes everything currently playing in Farrago. For version 2, we increased the size of controls while moving others outside the LCD. We also added some new features to this area.

The bubbles now display the sound’s emoji, information about playback options (looping or solo), and importantly, include a stop button to quickly halt playback with one click. Clicking elsewhere on a bubble also highlights the tile in the relevant set, so you can make further adjustments. Lastly, VU meters help you keep track of sound levels and check to see if audio is too loud.

Playback and volume controls were moved out of the Now Playing area to create clearer differentiation between groups of controls. We also moved several window navigation controls into the bottom bar. With these changes, the fairly utilitarian look of Farrago 1 has been made much more attractive.

The Inspector

The details pane on the right side of the app’s main window is called the Inspector, and it’s home to many important settings. We gave it a substantial visual refresh:

Comparing side-by-side, you can see that the contents of the Inspector are largely the same in terms of functionality. There are some new controls, like adding/removing emoji and the Edit button (more on that below), as well as a new Automation section. By and large, however, version 2’s Inspector should be quite familiar to users of Farrago 1. The Loop, Solo, Pausable, and Hold controls remain, now converted from basic checkboxes to button toggles with artwork. The size of most controls and labels has been increased, while still maintaining efficiency of space, a repeating theme for this release.

A Popover Detour

One direction we tried for the Inspector was using popovers instead of a pane on the main window. Early in our design process, I had the thought that this could work much as it does in Audio Hijack for block settings. I imagined that getting rid of the inspector would free up much more space for large tiles and give the app a cleaner feel.

However, while popovers are great for many tasks, they generally can’t hold very much without needing complicated sub-navigation like tabs or expanding sections. After some experimentation, it eventually became apparent that popovers wouldn’t be a good fit for Farrago. The sub-navigation became overly complicated, negating the advantages popovers might give us. We soon reverted to an inspector pane, with a few space-saving refinements brought back from the popover experiment.

The Edit Window

The built-in audio editor is something completely new to this version of Farrago. While Farrago 1 offered very minimal fade in and fade out controls, we’ve now added more powerful fading, as well as cropping and audio removal.

The editor went through quite a bit of back and forth as we contemplated two different directions: something very basic, similar to QuickTime’s trimming or a more robust editor, closer to our fully-featured editor Fission.

The first, more basic option would have offered draggable in and out points as well as draggable fade lengths, but not much else. It was essentially a larger version of the editing adjustments offered in Farrago 1, mixed with QuickTime’s Trim function, and it was very confined.

The second option, of a more fully-featured editor akin to Fission approach, is much more powerful. You can really do a lot with it, including multiple fades in any direction and cutting to get down to the exact audio you want. You can zoom in or out to really see what you’re doing, and there are helpful Undo and Redo controls too. For many tasks, no additional editor will be needed at all.

This latter option became the obvious choice for us. Farrago doesn’t offer all the features of Fission, but it can do a lot more than QuickTime’s basic Trim function.

The App Icon

The app icon didn’t change too much between versions, but we did tweak it. In addition to beautifying the look, we also made it better match Apple’s new icon design paradigm.

You may remember that in MacOS 11 (Big Sur), Apple ushered in a major design change for app icons on the Mac. Instead of having many varying shapes (something which aids in recognition), Apple decided that all app icons would have the same squircle shape as iOS icons. While I understand the desire for uniformity behind this move, I find it makes app icons look too similar. Icon shape is an important tool we designers had to differentiate our icons, and that’s been lost.

With these concerns in mind, we have not fully embraced this new style across our line. That said, we have bent towards it in some places. Loopback adheres to the suggested shape, but that was a small conceit, as its existing icon was already almost this shape anyhow. We simply tweaked it from one squircle shape to another, so it wouldn’t fall into an uncanny valley of being close but not quite the same. Meanwhile, our updated squircle icons for Audio Hijack and SoundSource, seen at the right, have added a three dimensional element to help with differentiation.

Farrago’s icon is a bit different. From the beginning, it consisted of tile shapes stacked on top of each other to represent our multitude of sound tiles. I realized it would be possible for us to follow the spirit of the changes, without matching them exactly. I modified the tile shapes to align with the standard tile shapes, so there is uniformity. But I also shrunk, stacked, and rotated the tiles to give it a unique shape. I think this is a good happy medium, which looks good alongside the other app icons, but which also gives it its own unique character.

Marketing

Rogue Amoeba is a small company, which means that my work is not limited to just the design of the app itself. I also handle marketing, creating a cohesive visual look for each app on our website.

Web Page

For Farrago’s main web page, I tried going with a look that was a lot more busy and maximalist than I have for previous apps.

There is a lot of colour, repeating patterns, visual depth, and animations. In short, I aimed for more fun, injecting a feeling of play and experimentation into the visual design.

Homepage Banner

We place a banner at the top of our homepage for major news, and the banner for Farrago 2 was the most elaborate yet. The banner is shown as a static image below, but on the homepage, it rotated through multiple new features.

It also included the app icon, a screenshot of the app, an infinitely-scrolling background (which took some time to get moving as smoothly and slowly as I wanted), and a complicated loading animation. This was my most ambitious banner yet, requiring a lot of web code and design work to come together in just the right way. I was very pleased with the final result.

Overview Video

Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber called Farrago 1’s marketing movie “one of the best intro videos I’ve ever seen”. For version 2, we built on the original concept and made something more polished and a bit more elaborate. As before, the video is really just a screen capture of me playing sounds back in real time. The video was created with Farrago, Screenshot.app, and no small amount of patience.

The soundtrack was made in GarageBand, which allowed me to perfectly time it to the spoken words. GarageBand is truly a magical piece of software. It let me make a decent music track, despite having no musical experience. Having the voice and music match perfectly was very important, and my process benefitted greatly by GarageBand making it easy to iterate and get the timing just right. The video took literally hundreds of attempts to get it to something that was simple enough to follow, yet visually interesting, but the end result is worth it. It provides a great overview of the product, all in under 90 seconds.

After we were satisfied with the raw video, we ran it through a machine learning-based tool to increase the resolution so we could zoom in as far as I wanted. Finally, I composited it with Apple’s Motion app to pan and zoom to direct focus, and add in some basic overlays and titles while at it. The most difficult thing was actually adding the scrolling background pattern, which had to be done with a green screen-like chromakey tool. It was worth it for the visual flair.

Despite not being a video pro by any means, the amazing tools available let me make the video almost single-handedly.

In Conclusion

We work hard to make applications that are easy to use the first time you open them, and still powerful enough to do everything you need the hundredth time you launch the app. That work can be very time-consuming. My first sketch for Farrago 2 was made around March of 2021, over two years before the app’s eventual release. It was well worth it though, because Farrago 2 adds a level of polish, refinement, and fun to an already-established app. The upgrade let us rethink every part of the app and make it better.

One of the things I cherish about doing design for Rogue Amoeba is knowing our tools assist tens of thousands of users with their own creative projects. Helping people make great things is extremely rewarding, and I never get bored of hearing about the many ways that people use our software for their theatre shows, podcasts, streams, and more. If you’ve done something great with Farrago, tell us all about it.

As part of the unveiling of our Historic Screenshot Archive, I made some fun images to post to our social media accounts. Making those images was tricky, because interfaces were much smaller in the pre-Retina era. Here is how big a screenshot and app icon from 2002 displays on a Retina screen of today:

Screen resolution has increased so much that a once full-sized app window is tiny on modern displays.

The above screenshot of Audio Hijack’s main window, at a bit over 400 pixels wide, is smaller than even app icons of today, which can be as large as 1024 pixels wide.

I needed to scale the screenshot up by many hundreds of percent to be a useful size for a social media post. Enlarging with interpolation, however, turned the pixels into an ugly blur:

Enlarged with Lanczos interpolation, usually great for photos, this screenshot is too blurry.

So instead, I did a two-step dance. First, I exported the screenshot enlarged to 1000% using blocky nearest-neighbour interpolation. Next, I dropped that in my design app and resized it down to the size I needed:

This is more like it!

To be clear, we only ran this process on the social media images, like this one:

The social image for Audio Hijack. The effect is hard to notice at this size, but at some of the larger sizes it makes a big difference.

The screenshots you’ll find in the actual archive are unmodified. But thanks to this little trick, I could display old screenshots in all their pixely glory, even on Retina screens.

Earlier this year, we shipped a massive upgrade to our flagship audio recorder, Audio Hijack. In addition to over 100 new features, Audio Hijack 4 also includes an overhauled design. Without a doubt, this was the biggest design project I’ve tackled as Rogue Amoeba’s designer, and probably in my entire career. Now that it’s out, I can take you behind the scenes and show you how we went from design goals and sketches to a polished app.

Multiple Design Goals

When considering what to do for the new version, I worked out some clear design goals. Audio Hijack 3 was originally released in 2015, and it provided a great foundation. However, I knew there were places we could improve.

Less Visual Clutter: While I loved design of Audio Hijack 3, fantastically executed by Rogue Amoeba’s previous designer Christa, I felt it could be made cleaner and simpler. Audio Hijack’s critical functionality is found in the custom setups called sessions, which users create to capture and manipulate audio. I wanted to make the rest of the interface deferential to each session’s audio grid.

A More Functional Sessions List: Audio Hijack sessions are reusable and saved automatically. The list of saved sessions serves as the starting point for the app, and I wanted to improve that window by showing more details about sessions, as well as allowing the user to access basic controls without having to open them.

Better Navigation: In the previous version of Audio Hijack, a session’s recordings and timers were kept in a separate window, rather than being closely tied to each session. I felt this was something I could make flow more logically.

A Brighter, More Kinetic App: Audio Hijack 3 had a somewhat muted look, and I wanted to brighten the new version. From day one, we knew we’d be adding a new “Light” theme, but I also sought to add splashes of colour throughout the app. Our apps have also been trending towards having more and more movement, so it made sense to liven things up by adding more animation.

New App Icon: Finally, I was excited to make a new icon for the new version.

Let’s look at some of the ways we accomplished these various goals.

Reducing Clutter and Adding Colour

The design of Audio Hijack 4 came together over a long period of time. The node-based UI introduced in version 3 was a huge success, so we knew we wanted to keep that general concept intact, while improving myriad facets of it. I dabbled with various ideas off and on for quite some time, while our amazing developer Grant worked on the underlying code and new features.

Early Mocks

This is the very first mockup that I could find for version 4:

It shows just two blocks, but the connecting wire is surprisingly similar to what we ended up shipping. I knew right away that I wanted curved wires, though I was unsure if they would be worth the development effort. I also experimented with small icons under the block titles. This was quickly axed, however, because it led to too many cases where we needed to split block titles onto two lines.

In this next mock, I tried having tiles snap directly together. It’s an idea I still like, but it hasn’t yet made it past this concept phase:

These first two mockups also show that the colour scheme was fluctuating wildly. Both contained Audio Hijack’s signature oranges and blues, but the feel wasn’t figured out yet.

Getting There

Over time, my mockups moved closer to the app’s final form, and contained more and more of the eventual interface, as seen in the following mock:

This particular mockup is almost a halfway point between versions 3 and 4. The colours temporarily swung back towards version 3’s darker hues and the connecting wires have reverted back to straight. However, the sidebar on the right looks similar to the final product, with a reduction of the more ornate elements of the old UI.

Left: Version 3; Right: Version 4

The above screenshots zoom in on the shipping sidebars for version 3 and version 4. You can see the boxes around each group of blocks were removed, icons were enlarged, and the text was given more space. None of these were major changes, but together, they served to simplify the interface as a whole.

In this last mock, the app really started to look like what we eventually shipped, complete with the new “Light” theme:

This shot shows several ways we simplified the UI. The bottom bar in particular is a lot less complicated, and no longer extends all the way across the window. We also replaced multiple disparate views with tabs in the sidebar – more on that below. Even those great curved wires feel cleaner visually.

P3 Colours

One noticeable change between these early mocks and the shipping version is the implementation of brighter colours. The blues and oranges in Audio Hijack 4 dip into the territory of ‘P3’ colours, which display a little more vividly on newer monitors. Macs have shipped with P3 colour support for quite a few years, but this is the first time we felt it worth using throughout a whole app’s UI.

An approximation of the difference between standard sRGB color and brighter, more intense P3 colour.

You can only see P3 colour on a P3 monitor, but the above image gives an approximation of the relative difference. It’s subtle, but the non-P3 gradient on the bottom is less bright and dynamic than the P3 gradient on the top. Using the P3 colour system, we were able to make colours more intense than we could before.

To avoid overwhelming your eyes, these brighter colours are used sparingly, generally when we want to draw your attention. In our very basic array of colours, we use a bright orange to denote when something is “live”, and this extra pop of P3 intensity for the orange makes this important status just a little more eye-catching and harder to miss.

Enhanced Navigation via a More Powerful Session Sidebar

One of my biggest frustrations with Audio Hijack 3 was the navigational architecture of the app, which divided much of the content across different windows. For example, after you made a recording with a session, you then needed to open the Home window’s “Recordings” tab to access your audio. There, the recording was shown in a list with other sessions and their recordings. Schedules suffered from similar issues. It all worked, but the recordings and schedules for a session were not closely tied to the session itself, and I often found myself taking a few seconds to try and remember where to find them.

To improve this, we built out a much more powerful sidebar for the session window, one which incorporates these related items. The sidebar is already literally attached to the session, and thanks to the power of tabs, it now holds that session’s recordings, schedules, and even the newly-added scripting features. Sessions are now fully self-contained, and it works wonderfully.

An Improved Session List

Another element of the UI we wanted to improve was the list of reusable sessions. The previous Home window showed a rudimentary grid of saved sessions, with no indication of what was running.

The new session list in action, showing a quick summary of each session as well as which are active or inactive.

For Audio Hijack 4, we wanted to make the session list an active part of the interface. It’s now possible to start or stop a session, view and adjust the Auto Run setting, quickly scan sources, check audio levels, and see status. The new Session List window is now a much more powerful starting point for using the app. It’s also easily expanded-upon, and in the future, we’re planning to add even more.

Animations Abound

Audio Hijack 4 is a kinetic app, with subtle animations to aid in understanding. The tiles and wires move, meters bounce, and status icons pulsate to show when things are in action. I’m proud of all these animations, but there are two particular bits I want to call out.

First up are the amazing animations on the connecting wires. While the previous version’s wires could occasionally look somewhat soft, Audio Hijack 4’s wires are all drawn with vectors, so they’re super sharp. They’re also beautifully curved and feel incredibly snappy as you drag blocks around.

You may not have noticed, but these wires actually morph shape. When a device isn’t running, the wire is made of arrows showing the direction audio will flow. When you hit ‘Run’, however, each arrow changes into a pill shape, as it starts moving and bouncing to represent the audio levels of the sound passing through that wire. Hit ‘Stop’ and every single blip on the wire morphs back into an arrow.

My other favorite animations are the various status badges which show what a given session is doing. Much like a photo on a cereal box, here they’ve been enlarged to show texture (I’ve also slowed them down):

In app, these animations are infinitely-looping, vector-based, and very cool.

Marketing Too

Animations also found their way into the app’s product marketing. Animated versions of the interface can be found on the main product marketing page for Audio Hijack, as well as the welcome window we show on first launch. Using still images just didn’t do justice to the dynamic app we’ve made. Getting these various videos working required a decent amount of troubleshooting, and a bit more file bandwidth. The extra work was well worth it, however, to show off the app in motion.

A New App Icon

One final thing I’d like to discuss is Audio Hijack’s new icon. App icons serve as the most recognizable symbol for a product, and Audio Hijack 4’s icon took a long time to nail down. It seems almost nothing is as prone to endless discussion and debate as icons.

Audio Hijack 3’s bottle icon was attractive and well drawn, but the “audio in a bottle” metaphor was a bit oblique. I did briefly try to modernize the bottle concept with my own take on it:

The original bottle icon on the left, with my sketch of a refresh on the right.

Ultimately, though, this never left the early sketch stages. I next tried using some abstract shapes as a base. I still love many of the designs I created. This page of my sketchbook is particularly pleasing:

Those sketches eventually led to more refined mockups, like this one:

I was very into both abstract patterns and this particular colour gradient, which does partly mirror the orange and blues of the app’s UI. However, while this waveform-inspired look was tangentially related to audio, it lacked a strong visual link to the rest of the app.

So it was that the slanted wavy pattern was tilted to vertical and changed to orange on a darker background, to match the meters inside the app. Finally, I added a physical microphone to more clearly communicate the concept of ‘audio’.

Many of us inside Rogue Amoeba lament the recent “flattening” of app icons on the Mac, and the attendant loss of personality. While I did feel we needed to somewhat conform to the new tile design paradigm, I wanted to overlay a bit of 3D to help differentiate the shape (see also: SoundSource).

Above is my first rendition of the concept with a 3D microphone. This icon is a lot more visually tied to the actual app it represents. Once I got here, we were close, though there was still plenty of tweaking and refining. Perhaps most interestingly, the final icon actually features two small Easter eggs: the waveform is based on a recording of me saying the word “Hijack”, and the mic reads RA 2002, representing the year Rogue Amoeba was founded¹. Now you know!

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this peek at the design process for Audio Hijack 4. I was fortunate to work alongside a development team that was happy to spend time creating a wonderfully dynamic interface, one which shows off the useful new features and the rock-solid backend. I’m very pleased with how it all turned out.

However, I’ve only scratched the surface of all the new things you’ll see in Audio Hijack 4. I didn’t even mention major new features like manual pipeline connections or the new Global window. If you’ve used Audio Hijack before, be sure to give the “What’s New” page a look. Of course, if you’ve never used Audio Hijack, you ought to check out Audio Hijack 4 right here.

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Footnotes:

1. Hey, that was 20 years ago! What a pleasingly round number. I doubt it will come up again anytime soon.↩︎

Not so long ago, I wrote about the design of SoundSource 4. That version marked SoundSource’s transition from a simple audio device selector into a much more powerful app. Recently, we released the new SoundSource 5, featuring many improvements, both technical and in terms of design.

Getting Better All the Time

When I think of the design process for SoundSource 5, a single word comes to mind: refinement. We revisited every part of the user interface, to deliver an update that goes well beyond the sum of its parts. The new interface both looks better and works better.

In this article, I’ll go over some of the refinements we implemented to make SoundSource 5 both useful and delightful.

Compact View

SoundSource 4 started out very small and compact, but as features were added, the main window grew. While it wasn’t massively oversized, we knew we wanted to find ways to slim things down.

The most obvious way SoundSource 5 accomplishes this is with the new Compact view. As you can see below, when SoundSource is switched to its Compact view, many text labels are removed. This significantly reduces the width of the main window, which is particularly handy if you leave SoundSource pinned open. Clarity in the Compact view is somewhat reduced, but toggling back to the Standard view quickly restores it.

The Compact view also removes text from the device selector, cutting it down to a fraction of its standard length. The device icons which remain work particularly well if you have a small number of devices attached to your Mac, as most users do. To create consistency, we also added those icons to the Standard view, where they serve as a secondary visual cue.

Animation

SoundSource does most of its work while in the background, with its only visible part showing in the menu bar. When it is open, we wanted the app to feel snappy and vibrant. One of the ways we accomplished that was by adding subtle animations throughout. This is most noticeable in the toolbar at the top of the main window, where each icon subtly moves between states.

Here are two of the animations from the toolbar:

The size and pin toggle animations, enlarged and slowed to show details

All of these animations are native CoreAnimation assets, built with a tool called Kite Compositor. Kite builds pre-packaged animation archives, which allowed me to iterate super quickly on the animations. I could open, tweak, and re-export animations without much work from the developer.

Reducing Visual Clutter

Before starting work on SoundSource 5, I took some time away from version 4. When I came back with fresh eyes, I noticed a busier interface than I wanted. The bubbles within bubbles within bubbles were logical, but visually cluttered. The best example of this was the nesting that occurred with effects.

Effects were nested two levels in

We knew we could do better. In SoundSource 5, we cleaned this up significantly, and un-matryoshka’ed those nesting shapes. The selection indicator became full width, which rid us of the bubble around individual effects. We also moved the full version of our built-in 10-band equalizer into a popover, matching the way Audio Units are loaded. This enabled us to make the entire Effects area much more uniform. Moving the EQ’s advanced controls out of the main window also allowed it to fit better in the Compact view.

SoundSource 5, with fewer nested shapes

Overly-nested interface elements are harder to parse, so this new design is a big win for readability.

Accent Colours

For many years, MacOS has made it possible to adjust the hue used for all kinds of standard controls, such as sliders, buttons, and checkboxes. Changing the accent colour setting in the General System Preference lets the OS color those controls in many applications.

Though Rogue Amoeba’s applications use many standard controls, some also use what we call a “key colour”, which overrides the system’s accent colour. For example, our soundboard app Farrago has a purple theme, and many of its controls are thus tinted purple.

Farrago’s purple key colour in action

In a similar fashion, SoundSource 4 used its green key colour on almost all the elements in the UI. For version 5, we toned this down quite a bit. SoundSource now uses neutral greys and blacks in many places, and its remaining green elements can all be re-coloured programmatically:

The default tint

This change allowed us to also provide a new appearance preference. When the “Follow System Accent Color” checkbox is turned on in SoundSource’s preferences, the interface will respect the system’s accent setting, adjusting controls to use the selected colour. Here’s a composite, showing all the system tints SoundSource can take on:

Sorry, this trippy rainbow mode is not available in the app.

These changes should make the app feel at home in almost any setup. And of course, all of these tints look great in both light and dark mode.

Big Sur’s Influence

At the virtual WWDC 2020, Apple announced MacOS 11 (Big Sur), which will bring a wholesale redesign of MacOS. Development of SoundSource 5 was nearly complete when Big Sur was first shown off, so these changes didn’t cause much in the way of updates. Fortunately, many of our design choices for SoundSource 5 already aligned quite well with Apple’s new design guidelines.

However, we did make one change specifically as a result of Big Sur. You may have seen that one of the most talked-about changes in the new OS is its updated style of app icon:

Big Sur’s updated icon style

We don’t plan to rush out updates to all of our app icons to match this style. However, SoundSource’s icon adapted rather easily, so we updated to the new, boxier style for SoundSource 5.

The impact on SoundSource’s icon

We’re hard at work on updates for Big Sur (watch our Status page and social media for more), so this new icon will fit in nicely on Big Sur soon.

Handling Applications

The last big change I’ll touch on is how SoundSource handles configuring per-application audio control. In the previous version, controlling an application’s audio required you to manually add the app to SoundSource. We overhauled this rather dramatically with SoundSource 5. Now, when an app produces sound, it automatically appears in SoundSource’s main window. It’s then immediately ready for adjustment, with less setup required.

This improved behavior seems very natural now that it’s implemented, but it didn’t occur to us for SoundSource 4. Sometimes you arrive at a new solution to a problem, and it’s so obvious that other solutions no longer make sense. That was very much the case here.

Try It Yourself

One of the major areas we focused on for SoundSource 5 was doing existing things better. The update is faster, smarter, and takes up less space on your screen. Overall, it’s a tremendous leap forward in quality, and we couldn’t be more pleased.

If you’re new to SoundSource, learn more on the main SoundSource page. For existing users, we have a helpful “What’s New in SoundSource 5” page available. SoundSource has become an indispensable tool for controlling audio on our Macs, and we hope you’ll find it similarly useful.