Uninstalling

Uninstalling

Neither platform is "drag it to the trash". AudioHub installs a background service and, if you asked for Mode B, an audio driver — both outlive the app window and both need an authorized removal.

Two things are true on both platforms:

• Your data is kept. Settings, machine identity, pairings and logs survive an uninstall. See What is kept.
• Uninstalling is not unpairing. Peers keep their record of this machine. If you want to be gone from the other machine's list, unpair there — or here, before you uninstall.

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macOS

The uninstaller lives on the disk image

Uninstall AudioHub.app is on the .dmg you installed from. It is never copied to your disk, so there is nothing to find in /Applications. If you deleted the image, download the same release again and open it.

Running it

1. Open the .dmg and double-click Uninstall AudioHub.
2. A confirmation dialog states what will be removed and what will be kept. Choosing Cancel does nothing at all.
3. macOS asks for an administrator password. Cancelling here reports System authorization was cancelled. AudioHub was not uninstalled. and changes nothing.
4. On success: AudioHub was uninstalled. Your settings and pairing data were kept.

System audio restarts briefly during this, but only if the driver was installed — removing a Core Audio plug-in requires restarting Core Audio. Anything playing on any application will glitch for a moment.

What the macOS uninstaller removes

Removed	Path
The application	/Applications/AudioHub.app
The background service, every installed version	/Library/Application Support/AudioHub/service
The machine-local signing certificate and its keychain	/Library/Application Support/AudioHub/signing
The audio driver	/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/AudioHubDriver.driver
The login item, for every account on the machine	~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.audiohub.app.autostart.plist
Two lifecycle files per account	ipc.json, service-installed-v1
The installer receipts	pkgutil forgets com.audiohub.app.pkg and com.audiohub.driver.pkg

This is the only thing that clears the accumulated service versions. Each upgrade adds a new hash-named directory and never deletes the previous one, so on a machine that has been upgraded a few times this is not a trivial amount of disk.

When it refuses instead of finishing

The uninstaller fails closed rather than half-removing a product. It stops, with a message, if it finds:

• a symlink where /Applications/AudioHub.app or the driver should be;
• a bundle at either path whose identifier is not AudioHub's — it will not delete something it cannot prove is ours;
• machine directories under /Library/Application Support/AudioHub that are not root-owned, or are writable by another user;
• another AudioHub install or uninstall already running;
• a process it cannot stop, or a Core Audio that does not come back after the driver is removed.

In every one of those cases the failure dialog names the problem and the product stays installed and repairable. Re-running the uninstaller after fixing the cause is safe.

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Windows

Uninstall from Settings › Apps › Installed apps (or Control Panel) in the normal way. It needs elevation.

Answering "No" to the driver prompt cancels the entire uninstall

If a driver is installed, the uninstaller asks:

AudioHub virtual audio is installed.

Remove its driver too? Choosing No cancels uninstall so the driver never loses its required daemon.

Read that literally. No is not "keep the driver, remove everything else" — it aborts the whole uninstall. Nothing is removed. The only explanation is a line written into the uninstaller's details area, which is collapsed by default:

AudioHub uninstall cancelled; the App, daemon, and driver remain installed.

So what you are likely to see is an uninstaller that simply stops. It reads as broken and is not. The AudioHubVad device points at audiohubd.exe inside Program Files. Removing that executable while leaving the device registered would leave a privileged component wired to a file that no longer exists, with no way to reach it from the UI. There is no supported half-state, so the uninstaller offers none.

To actually uninstall, answer Yes.

The prompt only appears when a driver package is bound. If you never installed one — the normal case on Windows, where the shipped driver is unsigned and cannot be installed — you will not see it. A silent uninstall never asks and removes the driver automatically.

Two endings that are not failures

Ending	What happened	What to do
Windows must restart before AudioHubVad can be removed safely.	Windows deferred the driver removal to a reboot. The app, service, scheduled task and driver were all kept on purpose.	Restart Windows, then run the uninstall again.
Windows could not safely remove the AudioHub virtual audio driver.	Removal failed and the reason is shown. The app and service were kept so you can retry.	Fix the reported cause and retry.

A pending driver removal is deliberately not reported as a successful uninstall. If you drive uninstalls from a script, use the QuietUninstallString recorded in the registry rather than uninstall.exe /S: the plain form returns success even when the inner process correctly retained the product, while the quiet wrapper waits and propagates the real exit code.

What the Windows uninstaller removes

Removed	Where
The application, service, CLI and staged driver files	C:\Program Files\AudioHub
The audio driver, if installed and you answered Yes	Windows driver store
The login task	scheduled task AudioHubDaemon
The firewall rule	inbound rule AudioHub daemon (Domain, Private)
Two lifecycle files, for the account running the uninstall	%APPDATA%\AudioHub\ipc.json, %APPDATA%\AudioHub\service-installed-v1

If those two lifecycle files cannot be removed, the uninstall stops and keeps the app, so a later reinstall cannot silently inherit a broken startup state.

Only the account that runs the uninstall gets its lifecycle files cleaned. The uninstaller never walks every user profile as SYSTEM — a user-owned junction in someone else's AppData would be a privileged path to follow.

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What is kept

Both uninstallers stop at the boundary between product and your data.

Platform	Folder
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/AudioHub
Windows	%APPDATA%\AudioHub

The app shows the same path under Settings › General › Config folder.

What is in it:

File	What it is
identity.json	This machine's private key. Its public half is the fingerprint peers pin.
paired_peers.json	Every peer you have paired with
settings.json	Mode, and everything on the Settings page
peer_transport.json	Per-peer, per-direction latency, quality and connection-method choices
hal_slots.json	Which virtual device slot belongs to which peer
webui.json	Web Access settings
airplay-password	The AirPlay receiver password
app.log, daemon.log	Logs. Each is rotated once at 1 MB to .log.1.

Reinstalling on top of this folder restores the machine exactly as it was: same fingerprint, same peers, same settings. Nothing has to be paired again.

Deleting it destroys the machine identity

If you delete the folder — or just identity.json — the service generates a new key pair the next time it starts. That is not a reset of preferences; it is a new machine as far as every peer is concerned:

• this machine's fingerprint changes;
• every existing pairing becomes invalid and has to be set up again from both sides;
• peers that already published a virtual device for the old identity keep a dead one until they unpair it.

The app has a supported way to do this on purpose — Settings › General › Fingerprint › Reset — which tells you how many pairings it will invalidate before it does anything, and unpairs them for you. Prefer it over deleting files.

If you are removing AudioHub for good and want nothing left behind, delete the folder after the uninstaller has finished.

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Related

• Installation — including what an upgrade keeps
• Settings Reference — config paths, virtual device options, start at login
• Discovery and Pairing — what unpairing removes, and why a peer that is offline at the time does not find out