AUDIOBIND VS EARTRUMPET

LET'S GET THE OBVIOUS PART OUT OF THE WAY

EarTrumpet is free. AudioBind is $4.99. If you're comparing the two, that's probably the first thing you noticed, and we're not going to pretend it isn't a real factor. EarTrumpet is also genuinely good at what it does — it's the volume mixer Windows should have shipped with, and a lot of people use it every day without a single complaint.

So this isn't going to be one of those comparison pages where the free thing mysteriously comes out looking terrible. It doesn't. What we're actually going to do is explain what each tool is for, because they solve different problems, and the $4.99 question only makes sense once you know which problem you actually have.

WHAT EARTRUMPET ACTUALLY DOES

EarTrumpet replaces the clunky Windows volume mixer with something you'd actually want to use — a clean flyout from the taskbar showing every app that's making noise, with a slider for each one. You can also drag an individual app's icon onto a different output device, and its audio moves there.

That's a real, useful feature, and if all you want is "let me quickly send Spotify to my headset right now," EarTrumpet does that in about two clicks. It's fast, it's free, and it's open source, so there's no reason to distrust it.

WHERE THE TWO PRODUCTS DIVERGE

EarTrumpet does save your choice — it hands it to the same per-app output setting Windows keeps in its own Settings app, so an app you move generally stays moved. What it doesn't do, and was never trying to do, is react to anything. Move a window from Monitor A to Monitor B, and EarTrumpet has no concept of "this monitor means this speaker" at all. Every change is a manual action, by design — it's a mixer, not a rules engine.

It also only sends an app's audio to one device at a time, the same way Windows itself does. If you want one app's audio coming out of two devices simultaneously — a TV for immersion and a headset for cues, say — EarTrumpet can't do that. Nothing in its design is built for it.

SO WHERE DOES THE $4.99 ACTUALLY GO?

Into two things, specifically. First, AudioBind watches which monitor your active window is on and switches audio automatically — no dragging, no menu, no remembering to do it. You set the rule once (this monitor means these speakers) and it's just true from then on, across reboots, across app restarts, across however many times you move that window around.

Second, AudioBind can send one app's audio to more than one device at the same time. That's the racing-sim-through-the-TV-plus-headset scenario, or a bass shaker running alongside real speakers, or any setup where "just one output" isn't actually what you want. This is the one EarTrumpet structurally can't do, free or not — it's not a missing feature they forgot, it's just outside what a per-app volume mixer is built to handle.

If neither of those is a problem you actually have — if you're mostly just adjusting volume per app on a single output — you don't need AudioBind. EarTrumpet already does that job well, for free, and we'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

CAN YOU RUN BOTH?

Yes. They're not really fighting for the same job — EarTrumpet handles the moment-to-moment volume mixing, AudioBind handles the automatic routing and mirroring in the background. Nothing about installing one requires uninstalling the other.

QUICK QUESTIONS