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On-Demand Mode — When and How to Use It

AudioRoute ships with its background daemon set to Always on — it boots with your Mac and sits ready to capture audio at any moment. On-Demand is an alternative mode for power users who'd rather have the daemon run only while the AudioRoute tray app is open. This guide explains exactly what changes, the silent-recording trade-off you're accepting, and how to switch in either direction.

Updated May 2026 macOS 14.5+ ~4 minutes

What On-Demand mode is

AudioRoute has three pieces:

• A background daemon that does the actual audio capture work (talking to the CoreAudio process-tap API, writing into shared memory).
• A tray (menu bar) app — the UI you interact with, including the record button and settings.
• A virtual audio device ("AudioRoute Capture") and a VST/AU plugin, both of which read audio from the daemon.

In the default Always-on mode, the daemon is registered as a per-user LaunchAgent. It starts when you log in, stays alive in the background, and is ready to deliver audio the moment anything asks for it — whether that's Audacity opening "AudioRoute Capture" as an input, a DAW loading the plugin, or you clicking record in the tray.

In On-Demand mode, the LaunchAgent is unloaded. The daemon only runs while the AudioRoute tray app is open. Close the tray app and the daemon exits with it. Open it again and the daemon comes back. That's the whole behavioral change — the rest of this guide is about the consequences of that.

Always-on vs On-demand at a glance

Read this before switching

The trade-offs are asymmetric. Always-on costs you a few megabytes of RAM and occasional Sparkle prompts. On-demand can cost you a recording you can't get back. That asymmetry is why we recommend Always-on for everyone except users who specifically know why they want On-demand.

Concretely, here's how each of the three capture paths is affected when the daemon isn't running:

• Virtual device ("AudioRoute Capture") — silent failure. Apps like Audacity, OBS, Zoom, Discord, ScreenFlow, or anything else that opens "AudioRoute Capture" as an input device will see the device, open it, and record dead silence with no warning. The waveform will be flat. You'll only notice on playback.
• VST/AU plugin in your DAW — visible failure. The plugin clearly displays "Daemon offline" and the meters sit at -inf dB. You can't miss it, but you do have to look. The plugin offers a Start Daemon button so you can rescue the session in one click.
• Tray recorder — unaffected. You're opening AudioRoute anyway to use this path, so the daemon comes up with it.

How to switch to On-demand

Open the AudioRoute tray app, click the Advanced disclosure to expand the advanced settings, scroll to the Daemon row near the bottom, and click the dropdown. It defaults to Always on — pick On-demand.

Picking On-demand brings up a confirmation dialog. Read it — it summarises everything in the previous section. To proceed, tick the "I understand the trade-off and accept the risk of silent recordings while AudioRoute is closed" checkbox at the bottom, then click Switch to On-Demand. The checkbox is required; you can't proceed without acknowledging the risk.

When you confirm, AudioRoute unloads the LaunchAgent. The next thing you'll see is the tray app reporting that the daemon is offline.

What "Daemon offline" looks like

In the tray app

Once you're in On-demand mode and the daemon isn't running, the tray app reflects it clearly: an Offline indicator in the top-right corner, a centred Daemon Not Running heading, and a single Start Daemon button. Your license activation status (bottom-left) and the rest of the UI are unaffected — only the daemon's state changes.

In the VST/AU plugin

In your DAW, the AudioRoute Capture plugin shows a red Daemon offline status, meters at -inf, and a prominent blue Start Daemon button where the meters would normally be. You can start the daemon directly from inside the plugin without alt-tabbing — useful when you're mid-session.

Starting the daemon from tray or VST

Either Start Daemon button does the same thing: it launches the daemon process. Within a second or so the plugin status flips from "Daemon offline" to a green Capturing indicator with the active sample rate and channel count, and the meters become live.

From this point on, the daemon stays alive as long as the AudioRoute tray app is open. Close the tray and the daemon shuts down with it — that's the defining behavior of On-demand mode.

Boot behavior

In On-demand mode, the daemon will not start automatically when you log in. The LaunchAgent that handles auto-start is unloaded as part of switching modes, and it stays unloaded until you switch back to Always-on. Each session, you'll need to either:

• Open the AudioRoute tray app (and it'll bring the daemon up with it), or
• Switch back to Always-on once and let the LaunchAgent take over again.

This is the intended behavior — the whole point of On-demand is that nothing is running in the background unless you ask for it. But it does mean an additional manual step before any recording session.

Switching back to Always-on

Same place: Advanced → Daemon dropdown → Always on. No confirmation dialog this time — you're returning to the safe default. AudioRoute reloads the LaunchAgent and the daemon will start with your Mac from now on. If the daemon isn't already running at the moment you switch, it starts immediately.

Which mode should I use?

Stick with Always-on if you use AudioRoute's virtual device across other apps (Audacity, OBS, Zoom, Discord) or if you record often enough that "is the daemon running?" isn't a question you want to answer before each session. The background cost is negligible, and the daemon's most useful property — "it's there when you need it" — is the entire reason it exists.

Consider On-demand if you fall into one of these specific cases:

• You only ever use AudioRoute through the tray recorder or a DAW plugin. The two paths that visibly fail when the daemon is offline. The silent-recording risk doesn't apply to you because you wouldn't be using the virtual device anyway.
• You're a power user squeezing every megabyte and CPU cycle — e.g. on a low-spec MacBook Air doing latency-sensitive work where you want zero background services.
• You want full control over when update prompts appear. Sparkle only runs while AudioRoute is open in On-demand mode, so you won't get an update offer mid-session in another app.

For everyone else — and that's most people — Always-on is the right call. The mode is in the UI because we believe in giving advanced users the choice, not because most people should change it.