Tooth Fairy
Tooth Fairy (via Brian Webster):
Tooth Fairy helps you to switch connection of selected bluetooth devices, for example, AirPods, directly from menu bar or even global hotkey.
I was surprised that the AirPods don’t just show up the Mac’s menu of speakers, like they do on iOS. You have to go to the Bluetooth menu (which you may not have any other reason to have enabled), find the AirPods, and choose Connect from the submenu. Tooth Fairy lets you set a hotkey—I chose F12 because of the speaker icon—to connect to the AirPods, and it has a hollow or filled indicator in the menu bar for whether they are connected. So you can also see when the AirPods have auto-reconnected to the Mac, e.g. because it was the last-used device, and you don’t have to manually connect to them.
Update (2017-08-04): Version 2.4 adds a battery level indicator.
10 Comments RSS · Twitter
Um, they do show up in the speaker drop-down, in the menu bar? You just have to have them in your ears (so that they're on).
@Duncan If I last used the AirPods with my iPhone, they do not show up in the speaker menu on the Mac. They only appear there after I use the Bluetooth menu to connect to them.
My AirPods don't show up in my volume menu when I first open it, but they appear after a second or two. This is when the AirPods are connected to and playing audio from my iPhone.
I just tested and the AirPods always show up in the Volume drop down in the OS X menu bar, but it can sometimes take up to 10 seconds for them to appear. I have my AirPods paired to my iPhone with music playing and they still show up in the Devices list in OS X. It also shows the AirPod charge level in that dropdown, and the AirPod's case's charge level as well if you have that open.
Having to wait up to 10 seconds for them to appear in OS X and then another second or two kinda defeats the whole "available everywhere" that I was expecting. I was hoping to be able to more seamlessly switch between devices.
I've still to fully fathom how the iCloud based device switching works for AirPods - it's been stunningly unreliable for me. Similarly, I find they often don't auto-connect to my iPhone, and I have to manually select them as audio source by swiping control center up. I've also weirdly found that if i manually select my AirPods as the audio out in iOS, the feature where music auto pauses if I remove one ear simply doesn't work. This feature only ever works for me if auto-connecting worked. It's super frustrating, because when they work as expected, they are astonishingly convenient.
[…] more changes, including an indicator for AirPods battery level, though I already get that through Tooth Fairy. Also interesting is that it can show weather information, and that this is enabled by a […]
[…] has been one of my favorite little Mac utilities since I first heard about it last year. If you’ve used AirPods with a Mac, you know that they don’t auto-switch the way you […]
I just tried these and with TaoTronic airbuds and have them connected no problem, but when I click my quick key or press the button on the top it does not route my laptop sound to the headphones. Help!
