Automate your audio setup for when you open your laptop

Chorus can select the right speakers and microphone the moment you open your MacBook's lid or plug into a dock, without you touching the menu bar. It works off two events macOS already sends when either of those things happens: a system wake notification and a device-connection event. Set up a rule once, and both of them trigger the same check from then on.

The scenario this solves is a familiar one. A MacBook that spends half its life on the sofa or on the move, where the built-in speakers and mic are perfectly fine, and the other half at a desk, plugged into an external monitor with better speakers, or a dock with a proper microphone attached. Nothing about macOS knows which situation you're in when you sit down. It just keeps whatever output and input were selected last, wherever that happened to be.

macOS has no lid-open setting for audio, on purpose

It's worth being upfront about this: there is nothing in System Settings that lets you run an audio action specifically "when the lid opens." The closest built-in feature is the general automatic-switching toggle in Sound settings, which reacts to whatever device most recently became available and gives you no way to say "prefer this device at my desk, that one on the move." Opening the lid, by itself, changes nothing about audio at all.

That's a genuine gap, not an oversight this article is going to talk you out of. Wiring an audio switch to the lid opening is something a dedicated app has to build, because macOS's wake signal carries no information about audio devices whatsoever. It just says the Mac is awake again.

What actually happens when you open the lid

Chorus listens for that same system wake notification, the one macOS sends the instant your Mac comes back from sleep. When it fires, Chorus waits about a second, then checks which output and input devices are currently connected and runs your Auto-Switch rules against that list, top to bottom, first match wins.

The one-second pause is deliberate rather than a delay you're stuck with. Bluetooth accessories and dock hardware take a moment to redetect after sleep, so checking the instant the wake notification arrives risks acting on a list that hasn't finished filling in yet. Waiting that extra second means Chorus sees the setup you actually have, not the setup mid-way through appearing.

Plugging into a dock, monitor, or USB microphone works through a separate path that doesn't need that pause at all. The moment macOS reports a new audio device is present, Chorus re-runs the same rule check immediately. So if your lid is already open and you simply connect the dock, the switch happens straight away, no wake event required.

Building the rule: on the move vs at the desk

Open Auto-Switch in Chorus and add a rule that requires your desk setup, your monitor's speakers, or a dock-connected output, as the trigger, with that same device as the action. Put it at the top of the list. Then leave your built-in speakers and microphone out of the rules entirely and add them to your device priority instead, as the fallback for whenever nothing else is connected. That ordering is what does the actual work: wherever there's a desk device present, whether you just opened the lid next to it or plugged it in a second ago, the rule wins. Anywhere else, the built-in hardware wins by default because it's the only thing there.

If you use more than one desk, say a home office and a coworking desk, add a rule for each, in whatever order makes sense if you're ever near both. The rule only fires when its required device is actually connected, so having several active at once causes no conflict.

The same idea, for your microphone

Auto-Switch keeps inputs on their own separate list of rules, checked the same way as outputs but independently. If your desk has a proper microphone plugged into the dock, add an input rule for it the same way, and Chorus selects it the instant it's present, whether that's because you woke the Mac next to it or connected it directly. Unplug it, or close the lid and walk off, and the next matching rule, or your fallback, takes over without a trip to Sound settings.

None of this needs a driver or a kernel extension. Chorus switches devices using the same mechanism already built into macOS, it just watches for the moments that matter and acts on your rules automatically. It's a one-time purchase, $4.99, covering up to three Macs, with every feature free to try for 30 days and no account or card details required to start. It runs on macOS 13 or later, on both Intel and Apple Silicon.

For more on building a multi-step automation, see Apple's own Shortcuts user guide.

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