When the keys stop working.

The keys have been turned off deliberately, on this Mac, and nothing else is wrong. The button beside the warning says Turn the keys back on and does exactly that. The keyboard button along the bottom of the panel does the same thing, and is what paused them in the first place.

Pausing is checked before everything else, so while it is on you will not be told about anything below.

macOS handles the volume keys itself and hands them to nobody. Catching one before the system does is what Accessibility permission is for, and without it Optically never sees the key press at all.

The button beside the warning says Open Accessibility settings and takes you there. By hand it is System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Find Optically in the list and switch it on.

You do not need to relaunch. Optically re-checks the permission every few seconds, so the keys start working within moments of the switch going on.

macOS records the app’s signature alongside the permission. If that signature changes, the row stays in the list and stays ticked while the app is no longer trusted — and switching it off and on again does not re-record it. Optically says this itself when you use the fix button: “Already listed? Select it, press −, then relaunch”.

So: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, select Optically, press the − button to remove the row entirely, then open Optically again and allow it when it asks.

The permission is granted, but the connection Optically uses to catch the keys is not running. macOS shuts one down if it thinks the app has stalled, and a session change can take one out too.

There is no button for this one, because Optically is already handling it: it checks every three seconds and rebuilds the connection on its own. If the message is still there a minute later, quit from the panel and open Optically again, and tell us — that is a bug rather than a setting.

Nobody has said yet when the keys should be redirected, and Optically will not guess. Assuming “always” would take the volume keys away from your Mac’s own speakers, which is worse than doing nothing.

The button says Choose an output and opens the Setup card in the panel. The Keys on row there lists your audio outputs plus Any output. Pick the output the optical cable is on, or pick Any output if you want the keys redirected whatever your Mac is playing through.

This is Optically working as asked. The keys are tied to one output, your Mac is currently playing through a different one, and so the keys have gone back to normal macOS behaviour — which is the point of tying them to an output at all.

If that is not what you wanted, the button says Open Sound settings and takes you to System Settings → Sound to switch the output back. Or change the Keys on row in the Setup card to the output you are actually using.

An output you chose that is not plugged in at the moment is still listed, marked “(not connected)”, so an unplugged interface does not quietly lose your setting.

Optically can see the network but cannot reach the speaker you chose. The panel’s own error line is more specific: “‘Living Room’ not found” means other Sonos speakers answered and yours did not; “‘Living Room’ unreachable” means it answered discovery but not control.

Check the speaker is powered and on the same network as the Mac — the same Wi-Fi band is fine, a guest network or a second subnet is not. If you renamed the room in the Sonos app, pick it again from the Speaker row in the Setup card, because Optically matches on the name.

There is deliberately no fix button here. A speaker that is off or on another network is not something a settings pane can mend, and a button that opened one would be pretending otherwise.

Finding nothing at all is different from not finding your speaker, and Optically says so after two empty sweeps. It almost always means macOS is still waiting on the local network prompt, or that it was answered with No.

The button says Open Local Network settings. By hand it is System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network. Turn Optically on there. Speakers are found by asking the local network who is out there, so without it there is nothing to find.

Optically lists the rooms Sonos itself treats as visible. Surrounds and a sub are part of a room rather than rooms of their own, so they do not appear — pick the room, and the volume goes to the whole arrangement.

If nothing at all is listed, it is the local network permission above. If some rooms are listed and yours is not, use Look again in setup, and check the Mac and the speaker are on the same network.

Your speaker is grouped with other rooms in the Sonos app. Sonos holds a group’s volume on the room that coordinates it, so Optically addresses the group rather than the single speaker — which is what you want, since turning one room down inside a group is not what a volume key means.

Ungroup the room in the Sonos app and the keys go back to that speaker alone. Optically re-reads the grouping about every half a minute, so there is nothing to restart.

Fourteen days are up and there is no licence on this Mac, so the keys are no longer redirected. Nothing is deleted: your speaker, your output and your settings are all still there, and the keys start working again the moment there is a licence.

The button beside it says Buy a licence. If you have already bought one, right-click the menu bar icon and use Sign In…, or paste your licence key there — a key verifies on your own Mac, offline.

This one is checked last of all, after everything above. If your trial has ended and your speaker is also unreachable, Optically tells you about the speaker first. Being asked for money on top of a broken setup is the wrong order.

Not a fault. In the last three days of the trial the panel counts down, with a Buy a licence button beside it. The keys keep working throughout.

Those two are soundbar features. On a Ray or a Beam they are one click from the panel; on a speaker that does not have them there is nothing to switch, so the buttons are disabled rather than hidden. Volume and mute work either way.

This is the exception to the order above: it replaces whatever the warning line would otherwise have said, because it is the one problem that undoes itself quietly. A setting that could not be written will be gone at the next launch, and the keys will still be working in the meantime, so nothing else would have told you.

Free some space on the startup disk, then change the setting again so it can be written.