I spend alot of time at my computer and with that much usage, have both speakers and headphones for different hours of the day. I was initially physically swapping 3.5MM audio output plugs on my speakers, lotsa actual effort! I then figured out I could plug my headphones into the “rear” speaker output and switch output through the audio control in OSX, much easier! But that was even work, to open the audio panel and chose the correct source, so today I figured out how to toggle sources in Applescript and the command line. I then bound that script to a keypress and now I can toggle audio sources much easier!

Since I run a Hackintosh, I am using my motherboard’s internal audio chipset with 8 channel output, although I’m assuming any Mac Pro or MacBook system with multiple audio output sources could use this. Internal speakers is regular out, Line Out is my headphones. Here is my audio panel:

At the beginning I found SoundSource and a few other menubar options for easily switching audio sources, but they still required work. I searched on Google and StackOverflow, but only found 30-50 line Applescript scripts which just controlled the Audio Panel, which seems klunky to me. The first piece of the puzzle was “switchaudio-osx” on Google Code which allowed me to control audio sources from the command line. Download the source, which contains a binary SwitchAudioSource.

Basic usage from a command line is to get a list of audio sources, shows your current audio source, and chose a new audio source:

$ SwitchAudioSource -a
Built-in Microphone (input)
Built-in Line Input (input)
Built-in Digital Input (input)
Built-in Output (output)
Built-in Line Output (output)
Built-in Line Output (output)
Built-in Digital Output (output)

$ SwitchAudioSource -c
Built-in Line Output

/$ ./SwitchAudioSource -s "Built-in Line Output"
output audio device set to "Built-in Line Output"

That was enough to do what I wanted from the command line, but to control SwitchAudioSource from a keypress, I used Spark, an open source “shortcut manager”, which I’ve written about previously. Spark allows to bind anything to custom keypresses. From here, it was figuring out enough Applescript to use SwitchAudioSource to toggle audio sources properly. Simple!

Code is here to copy, suit to fit your audio sources and and enjoy!