// the take
NoiseBuddy is a macOS menu bar and Touch Bar utility that lets you toggle ANC/Transparency listening modes on AirPods Pro or Beats Solo Pro without digging through the volume popover. It's a small, single-purpose Swift app for Mac users who switch modes often and want a one-click shortcut instead of a menu.
The NoiseCore framework cleanly separates the Bluetooth/AVFoundation device-control logic from the UI, so the listening-mode toggling code is reusable outside the menu bar app itself. It uses fishhook for runtime symbol interposition to hook into private AVFoundation/IOBluetooth APIs, which is a legitimately clever (if fragile) way to get at functionality Apple doesn't expose publicly. The scope is tight - it does exactly one thing (mode toggling) and doesn't try to be a general AirPods manager.
The README states outright that it no longer works on recent macOS versions and the author points people to a paid app (AirBuddy) instead - this is effectively an abandoned, dead project, not something you'd adopt today. It relies on private Apple frameworks and header reverse-engineering (NSTouchBar-Private.h, AVFoundation-Private.h, IOBluetooth-Private.h), which is exactly the kind of thing Apple breaks on every OS update, explaining why it stopped working. Touch Bar support itself is dead weight now since Apple removed Touch Bar from every current Mac lineup, so a chunk of the UI code targets hardware that no longer exists.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →