Global Mute

With this script you can manage the mute/unmute of your computer's microphone at the system level. Thus avoiding having to un-bury whatever window holds the button you need to click to mute or unmute yourself.

This Spoon has three possible bindings: mute, unmute, and toggle.

If you don't specify a key binding for toggle, then you MUST specify a mute AND unmute key binding. You can specify only the key binding for toggle and not define the other two. The mute key binding can be HELD down and used similarly to a walkie-talkie button.

One of my previous co-workers initially provided me with this particular feature in Hammerspoon. His original work can be found here: Jesse Lang The initial work contained an alert that would flash on a timer, keeping you aware that the MIC was hot. As I added monitors however, that alert would only flash on the monitor containing the front most application. As I made modifications, I also figured I would convert it to a Spoon format, using the Miro Windows Manager code as my baseline.

Special Note for ZOOM users

ZOOM meetings through me for a bit of loop when I discovered that my MIC was being opened seemingly randomly. It turns out that ZOOM will now unmute your system mic devices at startup, independently of it's own MUTE operation. Even opening the Settings/Audio panel will unmute the system mic devices. And of course this is BAD. Bad, bad programmers at Zoom! There doesn't seem to be a way to stop this nefarious behavior through settings.

Presumably other collaboration/conference tools may also practice this behavior, so a callback was added to handle this change.

Extra Special Note for SOCOCO users

From the this feature is for me department. Managing SOCOCO and any other Conferencing software becomes a huge "sound and mic" management nightmare. Feeback loops, people talking on their personal web conference and the sound piping right into Sococo. This becomes especially true when you start using a Global Mic Mute tool like this one. Initially my thought was to send ALT-T and ALT-L to toggle both the sound and mic within Sococo, and while that can be done, one minor drawback is that the Sococo app becomes the focus window, and one major drawback of not being able to query what state Sococo sound and mic are in. So I opted for the only solution that shouldn't really fail. If you enable this feature through the configure call, when you toggle your mic ON, the spoon will check to see if you have Sococo open and check to see if you have more than the Zoom control app open. If you don't run the Zoom control app, you may have to adjust the code to trigger on > 0 Zoom windows, rather than > 1. In any case, if it detects you are running Sococo and more than 1 Zoom window, it simply sends a kill to the Sococo app. Problem:Solved(). Hopefully others can use this as an example for killing Sococo when they run other Conferencing apps.

The glories of Mojave

It turns out that some of my fellow MacOS users haven't upgraded to Mojave yet, and thus the whole changing the background colors doesn't actually show through their menubar and dock. How quickly one forgets that those didn't used to be transparent...

So, in with the OLD, and some extra options to add some text to make it more visible that you are unmuted... Which of course is the whole point.

I've brought back the Microphone icon from the original Push2Talk.lua script, and added an option to add a Title/Text component to it.

Installation

This will create a ~/tmp temp file in your home directory and clone the repository into it, then move the Spoon to the ~/.hammerspoon/Spoons install directory. Then add the base loading lines into your ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua file. Once complete you can clean up the ~/tmp/global-mute-spoon directory as you see fit.

• NOTE: The upgrade to Catalina from Mojave wiped out my /Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors directory. I simply restored them from time machine. For those of you who are installing global-mute-spoon for the first time on Catalina, you'll have to come up with a replacement for the background color change.
• UPDATE: Each Catalina patch is wiping out the Solid Colors directory files. The directory exists, the jpg files just disappear. At this point I'm guessing that they were not licensed by Apple, and they are taking steps to rectify. Anyway you look at it, it seems odd. I may generate my own "solid color" jpg files and just add them to the repository.

mkdir ~/tmp

cd ~/tmp && git clone https://github.com/cmaahs/global-mute-spoon.git
cd ~/tmp/global-mute-spoon
mv GlobalMute.spoon ~/.hammerspoon/Spoons

if grep -Fxq 'local hyper = {"ctrl", "alt", "cmd"}' ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
then
    echo "line already exists."
else
    echo 'local hyper = {"ctrl", "alt", "cmd"}' >> ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
fi
if grep -Fxq 'local lesshyper = {"ctrl", "alt"}' ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
then
    echo "line already exists."
else
    echo 'local lesshyper = {"ctrl", "alt"}' >> ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
fi

if grep -Fxq 'hs.loadSpoon("GlobalMute")' ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
then
    echo "line already exists."
else
    echo 'hs.loadSpoon("GlobalMute")' >> ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
fi

if grep -Fxq 'spoon.GlobalMute:bindHotkeys({ unmute = {lesshyper, "u"}, mute   = {lesshyper, "m"}, toggle = {hyper, "space"} })' ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
then
    echo "line already exists."
else
    echo 'spoon.GlobalMute:bindHotkeys({ unmute = {lesshyper, "u"}, mute   = {lesshyper, "m"}, toggle = {hyper, "space"} })' >> ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
fi

if grep -Fxq 'spoon.GlobalMute:configure({ unmute_background = "file:///Library/Desktop%20Pictures/Solid%20Colors/Red%20Orange.png", mute_background = "file:///Library/Desktop%20Pictures/Solid%20Colors/Turquoise%20Green.png", enforce_desired_state = true, stop_sococo_for_zoom  = true,})' ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
then
    echo "line already exists."
else
    echo 'spoon.GlobalMute:configure({ unmute_background = "file:///Library/Desktop%20Pictures/Solid%20Colors/Red%20Orange.png", mute_background = "file:///Library/Desktop%20Pictures/Solid%20Colors/Turquoise%20Green.png", enforce_desired_state = true, stop_sococo_for_zoom  = true,})' >> ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua
fi

Configuration

The configuration file looks like this:

local hyper     = {"ctrl", "alt", "cmd"}
local lesshyper = {"ctrl", "alt"}
hs.loadSpoon("GlobalMute")
spoon.GlobalMute:bindHotkeys({
  unmute = {lesshyper, "u"},
  mute   = {lesshyper, "m"},
  toggle = {hyper, "space"}
})
spoon.GlobalMute:configure({
  unmute_background = 'file:///Library/Desktop%20Pictures/Solid%20Colors/Red%20Orange.png',
  mute_background   = 'file:///Library/Desktop%20Pictures/Solid%20Colors/Turquoise%20Green.png',
  enforce_desired_state = true,
  stop_sococo_for_zoom  = true,
  unmute_title = "<---- THEY CAN HEAR YOU -----",
  mute_title = "<-- MUTE",
  -- change_screens = "SCREENNAME1, SCREENNAME2"  -- This will only change the background of the specific screens.  string.find()
})
spoon.GlobalMute._logger.level = 3

The enforced_desired_state is the flag that handles when external forces make changes to the mute at a system level. If set to false your background will change and the new mute state will be accepted. If set to true the GlobalMute spoon will make a course correction and reset the system mute level on the device to what your current setting was.

The mute_title and unmute_title text will appear to the right of the microphone icon in the menubar. Hopefully making it easier to pickup on when you are actually unmuted. If you don't want the mute_title text, simply don't provide that option to the configure routine.

TODO / Thoughts

The downside is that one cannot just change the background color of the menu bar on the mac. Though in Dark Mode it is generally transparent and thus setting a Red/Orange background image allows it to bleed through. Set the "mute_background" to your normal image that you use and when you are muted (the normal mode) your background will be normal. This will be a problem for those who have adopted any active type backgrounds. Possibly there is a way to handle this, certainly some AppleScript must be able to configure that feature. It isn't high on my list of things, so if you have a burning desire to set an active background, feel free to submit a PR.