A common need for podcasters (especially those of us who record in a one two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a wife, two kids and a dog) is the ability to quickly mute our mic. While traditional microphones allow for the addition what's known as a 'cough button,'1 there isn't a great solution for USB mics. While some mics, like my beloved Yeti, have a built-in mute button, isn't ideal to use while recording for fear of bumping the microphone. Thankfully, I think I may have found a solution. Better yet, it doesn't require any additional hardware and it only costs $1.99.
Keyboard Maestro 9.0.6 - Hot-key tasking solution. Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate. Keyboard Maestro 8.0.4 – Hot-key tasking solution Keyboard Maestro is your hot-key solution that allows you to perform a multitude of tasks simply by pressing.
After hearing Merlin and Dan talking about the challenges of adding a cough button to a USB mic on the latest Back to Work, I decided to see if there was an app that could emulate the effect of a cough button. While I couldn't find exactly what I wanted, I was able to combine two apps to get almost all the way there.
Mute My Mic
While Mute My Mic offers a few essential settings for your microphone, the most useful for podcasters being the ability to mute and unmute a mic with the Option-F5 key. It's not robust, but it gets the job done. When your mic is live, the menu bar icon is black, when muted it's red, so you have a nice visual cue to that tells you if your mic is live. It's only $1.99 and is available through both the Mac App Store or via a direct download. Considering all the recent changes with sandboxing, I'd strongly consider buying direct as this is exactly the kind of global app that is leaving the Mac App Store in lieu of recent Sandboxing restrictions.
Better Touch Tools
No matter how good your muscle memory is, you don't want to have to go looking for the Option-F5 key every time you need to stifle a sniffle. This is where Better Touch Tool comes in. Much like Keyboard Maestro, Better Touch Tool lets you create macros that speed up common tasks on your Mac. Unlike Keyboard Maestro, it lets you activate these using gestures on your Trackpad or Magic Mouse. And, for reasons that make sense to me, you can download it for free (but consider donating).
Covering Your Cough
Combine the two and you have a passable cough button. In my case, I created a global gesture (in other words, it will work no matter what I'm doing on my Mac) so that a four finger swipe down triggers the Option-F5 key.
Swipe once to mute the mic, swipe again and you're live. While a better cough button might only mute when you hold the command down, this should serve in a pinch for most podcasters. I've contacted the developer to see if this feature can be added to a future version of the app, and looks like it has officially been added to his to-do list.
Any better tricks for hacking together a 'cough button'? Let me know in the comments.
Note: Revised on December 4, 2018 with a much better implementation of the pop-up palette, and some changes in timing and mouse movement.
One of the 'problems' with Keyboard Maestro is that it's so useful I use it a lot, leading to a large collection of macros. Due to the number of macros, sometimes when I want to add a new shortcut, I can't remember if I've used that shortcut before or not. Today's tip comes in two flavors to address that problem: Simple and Complex.
Short of just trying the shortcut, there's a way to check from within Keyboard Maestro itself: Type the macro's activation keys into the search box, as seen in the box at right.
You can't do this by pressing the actual shortcut keys—you have to type their character representations. You can do this with the 'Show Emoji & Symbols' option under the flag icon in the menu bar, if you've enabled it in the Keyboard System Preferences panel. But finding those few special keys (if you even know how to search for them) is a pain.
Technically, you could also use the pop-up character palette macro I wrote, except there's an issue: When the palette activates, it deactivates the search box, so the characters don't make it there. It's also overkill for this task, because there are characters that wouldn't be part of keyboard shortcuts, and you'd never need the HTML codes, just the characters.
So I wrote what wound up being a set of new macros that make searching for assigned keyboard shortcuts much easier.
I wanted a really-easy way to search assigned shortcuts, one that wouldn't require opening the Keyboard/Emoji viewer, and was only active within Keyboard Maestro. After some tinkering, I wound up with two new macro groups, a new character palette macro, and a new macro to display the new character palette. Huh?
Basically, those things all work together to pop-up an easy-to-use palette when I'm searching, as seen in the image at right. This palette doesn't pop up automatically; I have it paired to a 'search for keyboard shortcuts' hot key—that way, I can use both it and normal (⌘F) search modes.
You can, as usual, download the macros to edit/use as you wish. This archive contains all of the groups and macros discussed below.
Step one: Create a Keyboard Maestro app macro group
This group contains macros that are only available within the Keyboard Maestro app, that is, when you have the Keyboard Maestro editor window open. The group setup is really simple, just set the 'Available in these applications' pop-up to show Keyboard Maestro:
I named this group _KM, and it's only going to hold one macro (unless/until I have more macros that only run when Keyboard Maestro is active).
Step two: Create a new macro in the new macro group
This macro will be the one you trigger to search for your keyboard shortcuts, so assign it an easy keyboard shortcut, and give it a fitting name. Because this is a Find shortcut, I assigned it to ⌘⌃F and named it Find by Special Char. (In the original version of this post, I had assigned it to ⌘⌥F, but Keyboard Maestro now uses that for 'Find in All Macros'). Here's how this macro looks:
The macro waits a split second (because I found it sometimes failed if I didn't do this), then sends a ⌘⌥F to activate the search box—searching the All Macros level. (If you want to only search whatever sub-group you've chosen, change that to ⌘F).
It then moves the cursor to a spot down and left of the top-right corner of the window, activates another macro group, pauses again, and then moves the cursor once more. So what's all that about?
The first mouse move is to a fixed location near the find box because a pop-up palette of keys will soon appear in that location…that's what the activated macro group does—it activates a palette under the mouse. Once the palette is onscreen, another quick pause, then the mouse is moved to the 'x' box of the pop-up palette, for easy dismissal.
If you're writing these on your own, you won't have the macro group yet, so just insert the step but leave it set to 'none' until you have the next bit done.
Step three: Create another new macro group
This second macro group is set up to activate only in certain situations:
As you can see, the macros in this group will only run within Keyboard Maestro, and only when the editing window is frontmost. No activation keys are defined, because the palette will only be visible when called by the first macro.
So what's on the palette? These four macros…
These are simply the four keys that I use as modifier keys in my shortcuts—it'd be easy to add more, if I used the arrow keys, too, for instance. Each is a very simple two-step macro with a single-key activation key and the special character. Here's the macro for the ⌘ key, for example:
These can be triggered by single key shortcuts because they're only active when the macro group is active, and that's only true if I've activated the 'search for keyboard shortcuts' macro. And that's pretty much all there is to searching for my macros with a macro and a pop-up palette. (You have to manually close the palette when done; I haven't found a way to make it auto-dismiss—but with the mouse over the close icon, that's easy to do.)
Netropa Hot Key
Note: Search in Keyboard Maestro wil find all references to the keyboard shortcuts—not just those defined as keyboard shortcuts. This is why you'll probably see non-matching results when you search on special characters. But if you click into one of the apparently non-matching results, you'll find the hot key combo somewhere in there.
Keyboard Maestro 8 2 – Hot Key Tasking Solution 9 10
Related Posts:
