SherlockEQ 1.0.1

SherlockEQ 1.0.1

A small fix for the analog VU meter, which could sit pinned at the top of the dial during normal listening. Nothing else changes, and no settings move.

Fixed

• The analog VU meter reads the signal again. On the Analog Control Unit and the monitoring sidebar, the needle could stay pegged at the top of the dial for most material, so it wasn't showing you anything. It now rests around the middle of the dial at a normal listening level and moves with the audio. If you've set your playback calibration in Safe Listening, the dial is referenced to your comfortable level; if not, it uses a standard reference so ordinary program material sits mid-dial.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 1.0.0 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 1.0.0

SherlockEQ 1.0

SherlockEQ leaves beta. This is the first release without a leading zero, and it is deliberately not a feature release: the app here is the same app that shipped as 0.9.8, unchanged. What changed is the label. After a run of releases that added the last of the 1.0 work and then went quiet on fixes, the version number now says what the app has been for a while — finished enough to stand on its own.

If you're already running 0.9.8, updating to 1.0 changes nothing about your sound, your profiles, or your settings. If you're new here, the rest of these notes are an overview of what SherlockEQ actually does, rather than a list of what moved since last week.

What SherlockEQ is

A systemwide, per-ear equalizer for macOS. It captures the system audio mix through Apple's Core Audio tap API, processes it, and plays the result to your chosen output device — so every app is affected at once, with no per-app setup, no virtual audio driver, and no kernel extension. Nothing you play is ever recorded or sent anywhere.

Sound shaping

• Graphic EQ. A ten-band equalizer on the audiometric grid (31 Hz to 16 kHz), with bands labelled by what they do — rumble, bass, warmth, voice body, clarity, sibilance, air — over a live spectrum.
• Parametric EQ. A full canvas when you want it: frequency, gain, Q, and filter type per band, stacked bands, and drag-and-edit directly on the response curve.
• Per-ear chains. Independent left and right filtering, not just a balance offset — for asymmetric hearing, or a single ear that needs something the other doesn't.
• Master gain and balance after EQ, with headroom and clipping made visible rather than left to guesswork.
• Presets organized by goal rather than by music genre, and a preset applies without disturbing your hearing adjustment or notch.

Hearing-aware tools

• Audiogram to EQ. Enter per-ear thresholds — from a clinical audiogram or from the built-in Listening Check — and SherlockEQ derives a per-ear adjustment that lifts only where you've indicated reduced sensitivity. It lives in its own layer, so presets and EQ edits never overwrite it. New adjustments ease in over the first three weeks instead of arriving at full strength on day one, and an optional Adaptive style gives quiet passages more help and loud ones less.
• Listening Check. An optional five-minute guided estimate of your thresholds, ear by ear, using quiet pulsed tones — headphones and a quiet room required. It's an at-home estimate to tune by ear, not a hearing test and not a diagnosis.
• Tinnitus tone finder and notch. A continuous-phase sine sweep, tunable to one hertz, to explore where a tonal tinnitus sits — with octave comparison and an optional average-a-few-matches aid, because pitch matching is imprecise. Turn the result into a per-ear notch with Subtle, Balanced, or Strong presets, or set depth and width by hand.
• Adaptive Comfort. Three processors that act only when their target appears, then back off: bring voices forward, soften harsh moments, and reduce sharp "s" sounds. Each shows in plain language what it's doing right now.
• Headphone correction. Flatten a specific headphone's measured response using AutoEQ-style curves, imported or downloaded, as a separate layer ahead of your own EQ.

Levels and safe listening

• Live spectrum analyzer behind the EQ canvas, with switchable lenses — output, pre-EQ input, your manual curve, the resulting response, and a safety overlay.
• Metering in both flavours: per-channel peak/level meters and an analog VU pair anchored to your own comfortable listening level.
• Listening-dose estimate using the NIOSH model — 85 dBA over 8 hours, 3 dB exchange rate — anchored to a playback calibration you provide and tracking your system volume as you change it. Optional notifications as the day's accumulation approaches the warning threshold, plus a 7-day history. It is informational guidance, not a calibrated dosimeter, and it says so wherever a value is an estimate or simply unknown.

Surfaces and control

• Main window for full editing; menu-bar popover for a glance at status plus gain, balance, profile, and reference mode.
• Analog Control Unit. An optional vintage-style front panel with volume, output, balance, bass, mid, and treble knobs, VU meters, and an expandable spectrum panel — a separate quick-adjust mode driving its own tone profile and the macOS volume and output device.
• Profiles. Save a complete setup — EQ, gain, balance, correction, notch, comfort settings — and switch between them, optionally automatically when a given output device appears.
• Command line and Shortcuts. A sherlockeq CLI bundled in the app talks to the running app over local IPC, with --json output and scriptable exit codes; nine Shortcuts and Siri actions cover profile switching, gain, balance, simple EQ, reference mode, and status.
• Help built in. Around two dozen articles covering every feature, the reasoning behind it, and its limits — reachable in context from the screen you're on.

Requirements and privacy

• macOS 14.6 or later, Apple silicon and Intel (universal binary). Core Audio process taps need Sonoma 14.2 at minimum; 14.6 is the tested floor.
• One permission: System Audio Recording — grouped under Screen Recording on macOS 14, its own entry on macOS 15 and later. No microphone access, no screen or video capture. Notifications are optional and only used for safe-listening alerts.
• No account, no telemetry. Profiles and settings stay in ~/Library/Application Support/SherlockEQ/, exports carry no machine-identifying details, and nothing leaves your Mac unless you export it yourself.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.8 release notes for what shipped in the prior version. Earlier 0.x notes are archived on the pre-1.0 release notes page.

SherlockEQ 0.9.8

SherlockEQ 0.9.8

A small fix-and-polish release. The headline is the analog VU meter, which now moves with how loudly you're actually listening instead of sitting near the bottom of the dial. Nothing about the sound changes, and no settings move.

Fixed

• The analog VU meter reads your listening level now. It used to follow the raw digital signal, so quieter recordings and anything a streaming app had already turned down or normalized left the needle pinned at the bottom no matter how loud you had it. The dial is now anchored to your comfortable level: 0 on the meter is a moderate listening level (the same point the level meter marks in yellow), the needle rides mid-dial during normal listening, and it moves up and down with the volume — so the meter actually tells you something again. If you've set your playback calibration in Safe Listening, this tracks it exactly; if not, it uses the same sensible default the rest of the app does.
• Help articles read correctly again. On a few Help pages — the Analog Control Unit and Audiogram articles among them — a bullet point whose text ran onto a second line was breaking off into a stray, unindented paragraph in the middle of the list. Those lists now stay whole.

Changed

• One less repeated note on the Audiogram screen. A short disclosure that already appears in the Audiogram Help article was also sitting at the bottom of the screen itself. It's been removed from the screen; the same wording is one tap away under Help.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.7 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 0.9.7

SherlockEQ 0.9.7

A small fix-and-polish release: the Graphic EQ's per-ear gain readouts are legible again, and the in-app Help articles have been brought back in line with how the app actually works today. No settings move, and nothing about the sound changes.

Fixed

• Per-ear gain numbers on the Graphic EQ no longer get cut off. With "Adjust ears separately" turned on, the two gain readouts for each band were squeezed side by side and values like "-12.0" showed as "-12..." — unreadable at a glance. They're now stacked and color-coded to match each ear's slider and the Left/Right legend above the curve, so both numbers are fully visible and easy to tell apart.
• Help articles now match the current app. Several Help topics still described things the way they used to work — most visibly the Graphic EQ article, which still said "twelve-band" after the grid returned to ten bands. Toggle names, the order corrections are applied in, and a few other details across the Equalizer, Audiogram, Tinnitus Tools, and Spectrum articles have been brought up to date.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.6 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 0.9.6

SherlockEQ 0.9.6

A round of window and menu fixes. SherlockEQ now behaves the way a menu-bar app should — the Dock icon means what you told it to mean, the window comes back when you ask for it, and the menus are always there. Nothing about the sound changes, and no settings reset.

Windows and the Dock

• Clicking the Dock icon opens the window again. If you keep SherlockEQ in the Dock and had closed its window, clicking the icon brought the app forward but showed nothing. It now reopens the window — and specifically the one you last had open, whether that was the main window or the Analog Control Unit.
• “Hide the Dock icon” is now a plain on/off setting. It used to be tied to closing the window — the icon would appear whenever a window was open and only disappear afterward. Now it does exactly what it says: on means no Dock icon at all, off means the Dock icon is always there. It takes effect immediately and doesn’t depend on whether a window is open. SherlockEQ’s menus still appear whenever one of its windows is in front.
• The menu bar no longer comes up blank. On some Macs, opening the window could leave the menu bar showing the previous app’s menus instead of SherlockEQ’s. The underlying cause — the app switching its Dock/menu behavior each time a window opened — is gone, so the menus are reliably present now.

Menus

• The Window menu lists “SherlockEQ” and “Analog Control Unit” again (⌘0 and ⌘1), and the Audio menu — with Toggle Reference Mode (⌘B) — is reliably present. These were intermittently missing before.

First launch

• The main window opens when the setup wizard finishes, so a new install lands in the app rather than in an empty menu bar. You can close it and SherlockEQ keeps running, exactly as before.
• Clearer guidance about the menu-bar icon. On Macs with a notch, or a crowded menu bar, macOS can hide an app’s menu-bar icon — and no app can force it back. Setup now says so plainly and offers a one-tap “Keep SherlockEQ in the Dock” option as a dependable way back to the app if the icon is ever hard to find.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.5 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 0.9.5

SherlockEQ 0.9.5

A correctness fix to listening-exposure tracking. If you use the balance control, or listen to material that's much louder in one ear, please read the first item — exposure was being under-counted for you, and the safe-listening alerts may not have fired when they should have.

Fixed

• Exposure tracking now measures both ears. It measured only the left channel. For most listening that's harmless, because both ears carry roughly the same level — but with balance panned, or with strongly one-sided audio, the right ear could be driven hard while the tracker recorded almost nothing. In that state the daily exposure reading stayed near zero, the amber and red alerts didn't appear, and a long enough quiet stretch could clear exposure that had genuinely accumulated. SherlockEQ now takes the louder of the two ears, which is the conservative reading for a safety measure.
• About your existing history. Days recorded before this update were measured the old way, so any day you listened with balance panned may read lower than it truly was. Those records can't be recalculated after the fact. Tracking is accurate from this version onward.

Under the hood

• The website no longer loads any third-party code. Its handful of icons were being fetched from an outside content network on every visit; they're now part of the page itself. Nothing about the app changes — this closes a route by which someone else's compromised code could have run on the page you download from.
• Exposure history now keeps its full magnitude. A day's reading was previously stored capped at 100 %, so a day well past the limit was indistinguishable from a day that just reached it. The displays still read 0–100 % exactly as before; the underlying record now keeps the real figure, so a future version can show how far past the limit a day went.
• Build reproducibility: the exact version of the update framework used for each release is now recorded in the source repository.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.4 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 0.9.4

SherlockEQ 0.9.4

An interface release. Nothing about the sound changes, and no settings move or reset — Settings and Health & Safety were both presented in ways that worked against their own content, and this fixes that.

Settings is easier to scan

• Categories are now cards, in two columns. General, Appearance, Keyboard, and Data & Profiles sit open side by side instead of stacked full-width down the page. In a narrow window the columns collapse to one automatically.
• Every switch lines up at the right edge. Controls used to sit immediately after their label, so no two were in the same place and you had to hunt down the page for the one you wanted.
• Descriptions are shorter. Each setting keeps a one-line description; the longer explanation is now a tooltip you can hover for. The detail is still there when you want it, rather than a paragraph to re-read on every visit.
• Only the specialized sections stay folded. Advanced Audio and Diagnostics are still collapsed by default, because they're long and rarely needed. Everything else is open — a setting like "Launch at login" shouldn't need a click to reveal.
• Three settings were renamed to say what they do at a glance: Hide Dock icon when window closes, Show EQ and quick tone controls in popover, and Global Reference Mode shortcut. The settings themselves are unchanged.

Health & Safety is a page, not a popup

• It moved into Comfort & Safety, below Safe Listening. It's the reference material behind those tools, so it belongs with them rather than under App with things about the app itself.
• It opens in place, like any other screen. Nothing on it asks you to decide or confirm anything, so it no longer interrupts what you were doing or asks to be dismissed. Choosing another item in the sidebar is how you leave it.
• Its Help links no longer close it. Opening a Help article used to dismiss the whole disclosure; now Help opens alongside and you keep your place.

The short safety notes that appear on the Equalizer and Audiogram screens are unchanged. Those are meant to catch you in the moment, and still do.

Also in this release

• The window fits its contents again. Since the equalizer moved to ten bands it needed less room than it was asking for, so the window refused to be made as small as it could be, and opened wider than it needed to. Both now follow the actual content.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.3 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 0.9.3

SherlockEQ 0.9.3

This release makes the menu-bar popover somewhere you can actually change how things sound, moves both frequency layouts onto their standard sets, and fixes a few places where the app described its own settings inaccurately. Your profiles carry over — where a setting had to move, it was converted so the sound stays the same.

Quick tone adjustments without opening a window

• Bass, Mids, and Treble buttons in the menu-bar popover. Each press nudges a broad group of equalizer bands — less bass, brighter treble, mids forward or recessed — so you can adjust for a room, a pair of headphones, or a noisy café without leaving what you're doing. The equalizer curve now sits directly above them, so you can see the change as you make it.
• The adjustments are relative, not a second set of controls. There's no separate "Bass: +2 dB" in the popover, because for a full equalizer curve there's no single honest number to show. A press moves the real sliders on the Equalizer screen, and that screen remains the one place your settings live. To undo an adjustment, press the opposite button — it returns things exactly where they were.
• The popover was reorganized around what it's for. Output level and exposure sit together, then the controls worth a quick change, then a plain summary of what's being applied with links to the screens that manage it. If you'd rather keep the popover short, a setting hides the curve and the tone buttons together.

Standard frequency layouts

• The graphic equalizer is now ten bands. It uses the standard octave series — 31.5 Hz through 16 kHz — instead of the previous twelve, which added two extra bands between the octaves. Ten is what hardware equalizers and other audio software use, so settings and advice transfer more readily, and each slider covers a range wide enough to hear as one adjustment.
• The audiogram gained 750 Hz and 1500 Hz. These are standard clinical test frequencies, and they sit in the range speech occupies. With them, a hearing adjustment can follow a dip between the octave points rather than drawing a straight line across it. If you import an audiogram that measures either frequency, it now lands on its own row instead of being folded into a neighbour.

The app describes its own settings accurately

• Headphone correction now belongs to the profile. A profile already carried its own headphones, correction, and preamp — but the switch that turned the correction on or off was shared across every profile. Turning it off for one profile silently turned it off for all of them, with nothing on screen to suggest so. Each profile now keeps its own setting.
• The Equalizer no longer claims a correction is running when it isn't. A note on that screen reported headphone correction as part of the result whenever a correction was loaded, even if the correction was switched off. It now reports what's actually being applied.
• Clearer wording where a control's state was ambiguous. The headphone correction row showed a green checkmark and the word "On" beside a switch that could be off. The row now follows the switch, and when a correction isn't running, the app says which setting is responsible.

What happened to your settings

• Equalizer settings were converted, not reset. Any adjustment you had at 3 kHz or 6 kHz — the two bands the graphic equalizer no longer has sliders for — was folded into the surrounding bands so the result sounds the same. The built-in profiles were re-fitted onto the ten-band layout the same way. Slider positions will look different, particularly around 4 kHz, because fewer bands are now covering the same range; what you hear should not have changed.
• Existing audiograms were filled in, not zeroed. The two new frequencies were estimated from the measurements on either side, which is what those readings already implied. Leaving them at zero would have described normal hearing between two losses and prescribed a dip to match. You can enter real values for either frequency at any time.
• A headphone correction you had switched off stays off. Because that setting moved from the app to each profile, the old setting was carried across to every profile that has a correction loaded, rather than silently switching corrections back on.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.2 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 0.9.2

SherlockEQ 0.9.2

An important fix: SherlockEQ 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 could quit unexpectedly after roughly ten minutes of continuous playback. If you're running either of those versions, please update. Nothing else changes — no settings move, and your profiles carry over untouched.

Fixed

• SherlockEQ no longer quits unexpectedly during long listening sessions. The part of the app that measures your listening level — the one feeding the level meters and exposure tracking — was accumulating a small amount of internal overhead on every measurement instead of replacing it. Some twenty times a second, that added up: after about ten minutes of continuous audio it grew large enough to crash the app. Your saved profiles, EQ settings, and listening history were unaffected, and audio returned to normal as soon as SherlockEQ reopened, but the interruption was disruptive and it is fixed here. The measurement path now stores that state in a form that cannot accumulate, and a new automated test keeps it that way.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.1 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.

SherlockEQ 0.9.1

SherlockEQ 0.9.1

A maintenance release. The one fix you might notice resolves a confusing "ghost" state on the Audiogram screen for hearing profiles carried over from an earlier version; the rest are reliability and build-tooling improvements under the hood. Nothing changes in how your EQ, presets, hearing adjustments, or listening-dose tracking sound or behave.

Fixed

• "Ghost" audiograms carried over from earlier versions now read correctly. If you'd entered an audiogram in an older version, the Audiogram screen could contradict itself: it showed your threshold values and applied a real hearing adjustment, yet also said no thresholds had been entered — and the Clear Audiogram option was hidden exactly when you'd want it. SherlockEQ now reconciles these on load: the screen states the adjustment honestly (with the date it was carried over from), the per-frequency readouts match, and Clear Audiogram is always available whenever there's an adjustment to remove. The sound you were already hearing is preserved — this only changes what the screen tells you, not the audio.

Under the hood

• Reliability and diagnostics. Fixed a small memory-management issue in the listening-dose tracker (no effect on dose tracking itself), and the audiogram-to-EQ derivation now records a diagnostic if its band-overlap solver ever fails to converge, where before it was silent.
• Safer code signing. Hardened the build's code-signing step so the app's auto-update components are always signed the way Apple and the Sparkle updater expect. This is a packaging change — it doesn't affect the app you run.

Not a medical device

SherlockEQ is not a healthcare or medical application. It does not diagnose, treat, measure, or monitor any hearing condition, tinnitus, or disability. For concerns about your hearing, consult a doctor, audiologist, or licensed healthcare professional.

Previous release

See the 0.9.0 release notes for what shipped in the prior version.