Sugar

An equaliser for everything your Mac plays.

Every app at once — music, video, browser, games. No audio driver to install, no setup, and it never changes which speakers or headphones you've picked.

Coming to the Mac App Store How it works
Free, no ads No account needed Nothing leaves your Mac macOS 14.2+
Sugar's dashboard: a candy-paint panel with POWER, EQ and SIGNAL indicator lights, Sugarfree and Sugar mode switches, and a spectrum showing green bars per frequency band with a gold EQ curve drawn across them.
The same dashboard in Sugarfree mode: the EQ lamp is dark and the gold curve is a dead-straight line across the middle of the spectrum.
Sugarfree — a straight line means nothing is being changed
Two modes, no fiddling

Pick a sound and get on with it

Sugarfree is a true bypass. Not "close to flat" — the audio comes out bit-for-bit identical to how it went in.

Sugar is a gentle smile curve: a little more bass and treble, a little less midrange. It's centred so its own average sits at zero, which means it changes the tone without simply making everything louder — so you can switch between the two and actually judge the difference.

Close view of the spectrum gauge: ten green bars, one per frequency band, with a gold curve rising at the bass and treble ends and dipping through the midrange.
Sugar — the curve sits on the bands it's acting on
A gauge that means something

Watch the curve do its work

The bars show how much energy is playing in each frequency band, live. The gold line over them is the EQ curve actually being applied — drawn on those same bands, at the same positions.

That's the point of it. It isn't a decorative waveform: you can see the shape being applied to the music while you listen to it, and watch a flat line become a curve the moment you switch modes.

Stays out of the way

It doesn't take over your Mac

Older tools like this make you install a virtual audio driver and then select it as your output device, which means everything routes through them and your real speakers disappear from the Sound menu.

Sugar doesn't. It reads the audio your Mac is already playing, equalises it, and plays it back to whatever device you had selected. Change output the normal way and Sugar follows along. Quit it and everything is back to normal instantly — there's nothing left behind to undo.

No driver

Nothing to install alongside it. It uses macOS's own audio APIs.

Your output stays yours

Never appears in your Sound menu, never changes your selection.

Volume keys still work

Your real device stays selected, so the keys act on it as always.

Sugar's built-in help page, explaining what the app does, the two modes, the spectrum, and the indicator lamps.
Built-in help, one click from the dash
Three lights, all honest

You can tell what it's doing

  • POWER — the audio engine is running.
  • EQ — a non-flat preset is engaged.
  • SIGNAL — audio is genuinely flowing through Sugar right now.

SIGNAL is the useful one. It's driven by measured audio rather than by whether the app thinks it's working, so if it's lit, sound really is passing through.

Privacy

It records nothing

Sugar needs macOS permission to record system audio — that's simply how it reads what's playing in order to equalise it. That audio is processed in memory, in real time, and is never written to disk or sent anywhere.

There is no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising, and no network access of any kind. The only thing saved is which mode you last chose. See the privacy policy.