SonoMac

Sonos control that feels built into macOS.

A tiny native menu bar app for your Sonos system — whole-house volume, grouping, playback, per-room EQ and TV audio, styled like Control Center. No cloud, no account, no Electron. One sub-megabyte binary that talks to your speakers directly.

 

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Install

⬇ Download SonoMac.dmg, open it, drag SonoMac onto Applications, and launch it from there. The speaker icon appears in your menu bar.

Prefer the Terminal? This installs and launches it in one line, no dialogs:

curl -fsSL -o /tmp/SonoMac.zip https://github.com/inakizamores/SonoMac/releases/latest/download/SonoMac.zip && ditto -xk /tmp/SonoMac.zip /Applications && xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SonoMac.app && open /Applications/SonoMac.app

First launch — telling macOS to trust the app

SonoMac is open source and not notarized by Apple (notarization requires a paid Apple Developer subscription). macOS therefore warns you once. This is expected — here's the official Apple flow to approve it:

1. Double-click SonoMac in Applications. macOS shows "Apple could not verify SonoMac is free of malware" — click Done (not Move to Trash).
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security.
3. Scroll down to the Security section — you'll see "SonoMac was blocked to protect your Mac". Click Open Anyway.
4. Confirm with your password or Touch ID. macOS remembers the decision — you'll never be asked again, including after updates you install the same way.

Skeptical? Good instinct. The entire app is in this repository — you can read every line and build it yourself in under a minute.

Local Network permission

On first open of the panel, macOS asks for Local Network access. Click Allow — that's how SonoMac finds and controls your speakers. That's the entire setup: no account, no configuration, no pairing.

Features

Volume

• Master slider — one bar moves every room in the house proportionally
• Room & group volume — Control-Center-style capsule bars, one per room
• Per-speaker volume — expand any grouped room with the chevron for individual bars
• Even Out Volumes — one click sets every speaker in a group to the group average (70 / 60 / 50 → 60 / 60 / 60), like the modern Sonos app; the ⋯ menu can level the entire house the same way
• Drift-proof groups — volume ratios are snapshotted at drag start (the same SnapshotGroupVolume mechanism the Sonos app uses), so evened-out speakers stay perfectly even while you move the group or master slider
• Mute — click the speaker glyph on any bar; the glyph's waves track the level

Playback

• Play / pause / previous / next per room, with a now-playing line
• TV Audio — one click switches home-theater rooms (Arc, Beam, Ray, Playbar, Playbase, Amp) to TV input and back to the queue

Rooms & grouping

• Group With… — right-click any room to merge it into another room's group
• Separate Speakers / remove one speaker — break groups apart from the same menu
• Group All / Separate All — party mode and back, from the ⋯ menu

Sound settings

• Per-room Bass / Treble and Loudness
• Subwoofer on/off and level, Surrounds on/off with separate TV and Music levels, Ambient/Full music playback for surrounds
• Night Sound and Speech Enhancement for home-theater rooms

The apparatus

• Start at Login — always ready, never in your Dock
• Instant panel — rooms and levels render from cached state the moment it opens; live values glide in behind
• Zero background cost — polls only while the panel is open; closed, it does nothing

Everyday use

Gesture	Effect
Click menu bar icon	Open the panel
Drag any volume bar	Set level (tracks 1:1)
Two-finger swipe on a bar	Nudge level — damped so it can never jump
Click the speaker glyph	Mute / unmute that room (or everything, on the master)
Chevron on a grouped room	Show per-speaker bars
Right-click a room	Group With… · Separate Speakers · Even Out Volumes
⋯ menu	Group All · Separate All · Sound settings · Start at Login · Rescan

How it works

• Talks the same local UPnP/SOAP API the Sonos app uses (AVTransport, RenderingControl, GroupRenderingControl, ZoneGroupTopology) directly to your speakers on port 1400 — no Sonos account, no cloud round-trips
• Discovery via SSDP multicast, with last-known speaker addresses cached so reconnecting is instant even when multicast is slow
• Volume writes are throttled (~8/s) with echo suppression, so polling never fights your drag; failed commands retry once
• Pure Swift + SwiftUI MenuBarExtra. Zero third-party dependencies. Single arm64 binary.

Privacy

Everything stays on your LAN. SonoMac makes no connection to any server that isn't a Sonos speaker on your network. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no update phone-home. The app cannot see your Sonos account because it never asks for one.

Requirements

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon
• A Sonos S2 system on the same network as the Mac

Troubleshooting

• No speakers found — make sure the Mac is on the same network/VLAN as the speakers, then check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network has SonoMac enabled, then use ⋯ → Rescan Network.
• Panel shows stale rooms after network change — Rescan Network re-discovers from scratch.
• Volume moves but no sound changes — another controller may have the group muted; click the speaker glyph.

Build from source

Only Xcode Command Line Tools required (xcode-select --install) — no Xcode, no dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/inakizamores/SonoMac.git
cd SonoMac
./build.sh --install

./build.sh produces build/SonoMac.app; --install copies it to /Applications and launches it. ./release.sh builds the distributable DMG and zip. Tagged v* pushes are built and published automatically by GitHub Actions on macOS 26 runners (the workflow refuses to ship a build linked against an older SDK, which would render with legacy window chrome).

Sibling project

Control an Onkyo/Integra AV receiver the same way: OnkyoMac — same design, same philosophy, eISCP protocol.

License

MIT — do whatever you like with it.