Mechanical keyboard and click sounds on your Mac

How a Mac app hears your keys

macOS lets an app listen to keyboard and mouse events through an event tap. A sound app uses a listen-only tap: it’s told “a key went down”, plays a sound, and the key carries on to your app untouched. To listen to the keyboard, macOS asks you for Input Monitoring first.

Mouse and trackpad clicks are different: on recent macOS versions an app can often hear clicks without that permission, so a click-sound app may work before you allow anything.

What Input Monitoring really allows

The permission is broad: it lets an app see which keys you press, in every app. Apple can’t tell a sound app from a keylogger by the permission alone, so trust comes from what the app does with it. Things to look for:

• It says plainly that it never records, stores or sends your keystrokes, in its privacy policy, not just in an ad.
• It only needs to know the kind of key (a letter, space, return) to pick a sound, not which letter.
• It goes silent in password fields. macOS turns on Secure Input there and stops delivering those keys to every other app anyway.
• It works offline. A sound app has no reason to upload anything while you type.

You can see and switch off every app with this permission in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring.

The apps

Prices from each app’s own listing, October 2026:

• Mechvibes: free and open source, for Mac, Windows and Linux. Lots of community sound packs; on recent macOS some people report it staying silent (see the fixes below).
• Klack: $4.99 on the Mac App Store. Built around keyboard sounds.
• Keeby: $4.99. Keyboard sounds, plus left, right and middle mouse clicks.
• Mouse Click Sound: $2.99 on the Mac App Store. Mouse clicks, scroll sounds and a click ripple.
• Clacky: keyboard, click and scroll sounds in one app, plus a click ripple for recordings (more below).

Try the sound before you buy: most of them have a demo on their website.

Clacky’s keyboard and click sounds

Clacky has 29 keyboard sounds in 9 families (soft creamy ones, clacky ones, a typewriter, quiet library keys…) and 37 click sounds for the mouse and trackpad, plus a soft tick when you scroll. The sounds are synthesized, so every key sounds a little different, like a real board, and they follow where you are: keys on the left of the keyboard sound slightly left, clicks follow your pointer across the screen.

On privacy, Clacky’s rule is short: it never records, stores, logs or sends which keys you type. When a key goes down it keeps only its kind and roughly where it sits on the keyboard (left, middle, right), plays the sound, and drops it. Password fields stay silent. You can hear all of it on clacky.app before you install anything, and test your typing speed with the sounds in the typing test.

No sound? Fixes that work

1. Check Input Monitoring. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring: the app must be listed and on.
2. Quit and reopen the app. macOS often applies the permission only after a restart of the app.
3. Toggle it off and on. After an update, macOS can keep an old, stale permission. Remove the app from the list (the − button), add it again, reopen the app.
4. Secure Input stuck on? Some apps hold Secure Input while they’re open, like a password manager’s unlock window or Terminal’s Secure Keyboard Entry (in the Terminal menu). Every keyboard sound app goes quiet while it’s on.
5. Check the output. Volume up, the right speakers or headphones picked, and the app’s own volume not at zero.