Clank Keys reads the accelerometer hidden inside your MacBook and plays a real mechanical switch recording that matches how hard you actually hit the key. Soft tap, soft click. Slam it, hear the slam.
Apple Silicon MacBooks contain a motion sensor nobody documents. Clank Keys reads it about 800 times a second and correlates the shock of your finger bottoming out with the keystroke macOS reports.
A listen-only tap reads one number: which key. Nothing else, ever.
The bottom-out lands 8–13 ms after the key event; the sensor already has it.
Gravity stripped, noise floor tracked, peak turned into a number.
The two recordings that bracket your force play together. No steps, no jitter.
Every pack carries soft, medium, hard and slam tiers for eight key groups, derived from recordings shared under the MIT licence by the Mechvibes project.
Download it and enjoy it forever. It was built for one MacBook and then shared, and it stays that way.
Clank Keys is signed by its maker rather than through Apple, so macOS needs one command to let it open. Then it needs permission to hear keys — the Input Monitoring kind, not Accessibility.
Then eject the disk image.
Because it isn't notarised by Apple, the first launch is refused. Open Terminal and run this once:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Clank Keys.app"
Then open Clank Keys normally.
System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring → add Clank Keys and switch it on. Clank Keys opens this pane for you on first launch.
macOS caches the earlier refusal inside a running process, so the permission only takes effect on relaunch. Cmd-Q, then open it again. Then type.
It runs in the background. Find it in the Dock, the menu bar keycap, or open it again from Spotlight to bring up Settings.
Any Apple Silicon Mac whose Sensor Processing Unit exposes the accelerometer — most MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models from 2022 onward. Clank Keys checks on first launch and tells you plainly. Without it, sounds still play and vary with your typing rhythm instead of measured force.
No. The defaults were measured from real typing. Calibration in Settings → Feel is optional: two six-second passes that fit the range to your hands.
The keyboard tap reads a key code to choose a sound and discards it. Nothing is logged, nothing is stored, and the app contains no networking code, so nothing can leave your Mac. The code is small enough to read.
Idle CPU is under 1% of one core. The sensor runs at full rate only while you type and drops to a trickle 20 seconds after you stop.
Apple charges for notarisation and this is given away. The command removes the download quarantine flag once; after that it opens like any other app.