Studio Pair

Two Studio Displays. One stereo pair. Your volume keys still work.

Studio Pair sends Spotify's left channel to one Apple Studio Display and its right channel to the other. A small native macOS menu-bar app lets you swap sides, turn pairing off, and launch at login.

Early beta. Spotify desktop only. Other apps keep their normal output. Tested on one Apple silicon Mac with two Studio Displays. This is stereo routing; it does not add Dolby Atmos or guarantee better sound in every room.

Install with your coding agent

Paste into Codex or Claude Code:

Install Studio Pair from https://github.com/browser-use/studio-pair. Read install.md, check the prerequisites, build it locally, and install it in my user Applications folder. Preserve my audio defaults, volume, microphone, and existing settings. Show me the menu-bar controls and how to undo it. Ask before installing missing development tools. Do not run the hardware tone checks unless I ask.

Or, with Xcode Command Line Tools, Rust 1.87+ and Python 3 already installed:

git clone https://github.com/browser-use/studio-pair.git
cd studio-pair
python3 scripts/manage.py install

Requires macOS 14.2+, Spotify desktop, and exactly two Studio Displays exposing eight-channel audio at 48 kHz. Select one Studio Display as your normal sound output, start Spotify, then open Studio Pair. macOS may ask for system audio capture permission. Enable Launch at login in the popover if you want it to start automatically.

Builds are local and ad hoc signed. There is no notarized download yet. See install.md for setup and recovery.

Turn it off

Switch Stereo pairing off in the menu bar. Direct Spotify playback returns. Quit also stops the route; the app remembers your pairing preference for its next launch.

python3 scripts/manage.py stop

Unregister launch at login, restore audio and remove the installed app:

python3 scripts/manage.py uninstall

Settings and local recovery metadata are retained. No audio driver is installed.

How it works

Spotify → private CoreAudio process tap → Rust audio callback
                                         ├─ left  → Studio Display A
                                         └─ right → Studio Display B

Native volume / mute on the selected display → mirrored to the second

• Swift/AppKit menu bar, Rust audio engine, Objective-C CoreAudio bridge.
• Private aggregate with clock drift correction. Left/right assignment is saved by device identity.
• No changes to default output, microphone or hardware sample rates.
• A rollback journal tracks secondary volume/mute. Recovery restores those values only if they still match the app's last write.
• No audio files, telemetry, network calls, third-party Rust crates or HAL driver.

Limits and contributing

The first release handles Spotify only. It needs a Studio Display as the default output, so switching to headphones returns Spotify to direct playback. Unsupported channel layouts or sample rates are rejected. The route uses -6 dB software headroom, so compare sound at matched listening volume.

Clock drift correction is enabled and checked; acoustic synchronization has not been measured. Sleep/wake, unplug/reconnect, reboot login and long listening sessions still need broader testing. The macOS 14.2 deployment target is compiled in; actual hardware testing was on macOS 27.0.

Architecture and recovery · Validation · Contributing

MIT licensed. Built for a two-display desk that should have been a stereo system already.