Share one Mac's audio with two pairs of AirPods

I wanted to watch a movie with my partner without waking the baby asleep in the same room. One Mac, two pairs of AirPods, and one annoying catch: macOS will only send audio to a single output device at a time. So I built the thing that removes the catch. It is called MultiPods Audio.

Why this is harder than it should be

macOS treats sound like a single pipe: one output device, one volume. Put on headphones and the speakers go quiet. Connect a second pair of AirPods and they just sit there, paired but silent. There is no built-in “play to both”. You can rig something up in Audio MIDI Setup with an aggregate device, but it gives you no per-person volume and it is fiddly enough that most people give up. What you actually want is boring and simple: the same sound in two sets of ears, each at its own level.

What MultiPods Audio does

It lives in the menu bar. You pick which headphones should share the sound, press Start, and whatever the Mac is playing (Netflix, Apple Music, a FaceTime call) goes to all of them at once. Each pair gets its own volume slider, so mine can sit low while my partner keeps hers wherever she likes. Press Stop and your normal output comes back. No app window, no Dock icon, and it uses essentially no CPU while it waits.

Built on the boring, safe APIs

The part I cared about most: there is no driver to install, no kernel extension, no admin password. It uses only Apple’s public CoreAudio APIs, the same ones macOS uses to drive your own speakers, and it is fully sandboxed. It never touches your microphone, never inspects what you are playing, and sends nothing to the network. For an app that sits between your Mac and your ears, that felt non-negotiable.

The honest caveats

Bluetooth is still Bluetooth. While a session runs, the volume keys on your keyboard stop working, which is exactly why every headphone gets its own slider in the menu bar. Connect several pairs at once and macOS may drop to a lower-quality codec to keep up. Neither is something an app can fix; they are limits of the protocol, and I would rather say so than pretend.

Try it

MultiPods Audio is a one-time $3.99 on the Mac App Store, no subscription. It needs macOS 14 or later and two or more pairs of Bluetooth headphones (or one pair plus your Mac’s built-in speakers). If you have ever turned a film down to a whisper so it would not wake someone, this is for you.

MultiPods Audio on the Mac App Store

Built at Appgineering, the studio I co-founded.