Mic Drop mutes your microphone everywhere
I’ve gotten so used to having a physical mute button on my podcast recording setup that it’s quite disconcerting when I use a different setup that doesn’t offer one.
In the winter months, I work most of the time in “Studio B”, a second desk in a back bedroom that’s climate controlled in a way my drafty garage can’t be. My microphone here is a sturdy Shure MV7, but I’m connecting it via USB and its mute button is a capacitive circle that’s super awkward to reach.
As a result, I’ve been trying to find a simple way to mute that microphone using a similar gesture—push to mute, push again to unmute—that I use in my primary recording setup. After exploring a bunch of options, I’ve settled on Mic Drop, a free ($5 upgrade for pro features) Mac utility that does the job perfectly.
Mic Drop literally does everything I expected from it. It lives in your menu bar and has support for global hotkeys or AppleScript, optional audio and multiple visual notifications of mute status, the ability to choose which mics are muted and which ones aren’t, and even an optional push-to-talk toggle mode.
It’s a delight to find an app that doesn’t just do the basics, but (via its recently-released 2.0 update) offers all sorts of polish that elevate into a utility that’s truly worth recommending.
MicDrop is available in the Mac App Store.
(Update: It now supports Stream Deck natively, too, which is awesome.)
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