Keyboard sound app not working on your Mac

Updated October 25, 2026

Most silent keyboard sound apps on a Mac are missing Input Monitoring, are paused, or are playing to a different output than you are listening to. Work through the checks below in order; the first four cover the usual causes.

1. Is it allowed under Input Monitoring?

Open System Settings, Privacy & Security, Input Monitoring, and look for the app. If it is missing or switched off, the app hears no keys. Input Monitoring on a Mac covers the missing-entry and reset cases.

In Teclo, a missing permission shows twice: the menu bar icon is dimmed, and the window opens with “Teclo can’t hear your keys yet” each time the app starts. Teclo checks for the permission every two seconds and starts listening once it is there.

2. Is it paused?

Most keyboard sound apps have a pause, and it is easy to forget you used it. In Teclo, right-click the menu bar icon: it reads Pause Teclo or Resume Teclo. The switch at the top right of Teclo’s window does the same.

Teclo also goes quiet, with its icon dimmed, in two cases that are not a pause: when its 1-day trial has ended without a licence, and while you are recording on its Create page, so the recording does not pick up its own sounds.

3. Is anything turned down?

There are usually two volumes. Teclo’s slider at the bottom left of its window is its own, separate from your Mac’s, so check both. Above the middle, Teclo’s slider goes louder than the Mac’s own level through a limiter, which helps on quiet MacBook speakers.

4. Is it playing where you are listening?

Teclo plays through the Mac’s current output: the device picked in System Settings, Sound, Output. If you plugged in headphones, a display with speakers or an audio interface, the sound goes there. Pick the output you want in Sound, or from Control Center in the menu bar.

5. Is Secure Input on?

If sounds stop only in some places, a password field or a terminal’s Secure Keyboard Entry is the likely cause. Apple’s note says macOS then stops passing keyboard events to every app that intercepts them, in the foreground or background. See Secure Input on a Mac for how to find the app holding it.

6. Are only some keys silent?

• Teclo’s Options has “Silence modifier keys”, which mutes Shift, Control, Option and Command.
• Space, Return and Delete have their own sounds in every pack; the other keys share five variants, so a key that sounds different from its neighbour is working.
• In Teclo, a held key sounds again on every key repeat.

7. Did it stop after a while?

macOS switches off an event tap whose app takes too long to answer, and sends that app a “tap disabled by timeout” event. An app that does not handle it goes silent until restarted. Teclo switches its tap back on when that happens. Thock, the open-source app, had an open pull request for the same fix when we checked.

Teclo also lets the audio device sleep after a minute with no sound, so the first key after a long pause can be slightly late while the audio starts again. Keys after that play at once.

Still silent?

• Quit the app and open it again; for Teclo, right-click the menu bar icon and choose Quit Teclo, then open it from Applications.
• In Input Monitoring, switch the app off and on.
• If the sound is late rather than missing, see why typing sounds lag over Bluetooth.

Teclo’s support page has the Teclo-specific steps and an address to write to.