Tray Icon & Auto-Start

Aura Mixer is infrastructure — like a hardware mixer on your desk, it should always be on yet never demand attention. Two features make that real: the system tray icon and Windows auto-start.

The tray icon

While Minimize to tray on close is on (the default — Settings → General), Aura Mixer keeps an icon in the system tray (notification area, next to the clock):

• Left-click — bring the window back.
• Right-click — a menu with Start engine / Stop engine (it flips to match the engine's state), Show Aura Mixer and Quit.

Turn that option off and the tray icon goes away with it.

What ✕ really does

With Minimize to tray on close enabled (the default — Settings → General), clicking the window's ✕:

• hides the window to the tray,
• keeps all audio flowing — capture, processing, every output, untouched.

This is the safety net for live use: muscle memory closes windows, and a mixer that quits on ✕ would cut your stream's sound mid-sentence. With the option disabled, ✕ instead asks what you want to do, so a stray click still can't kill the audio unannounced.

To actually quit: right-click the tray icon → Quit (or, with the option off, click ✕ and confirm Close in the "Close Aura Mixer?" dialog). Audio stops, your state is auto-saved as always.

Auto-start with Windows

Settings → General → Auto-start with Windows registers Aura Mixer to launch at sign-in. It's switched on once, during your first launch — turn it off here if you'd rather open the app yourself. Combined with the tray behaviour, the mixer becomes a background fact of your PC: sign in → routing live → window out of sight until needed.

Add Minimize to tray on auto-start (just below it, off by default) and a sign-in launch keeps the window hidden in the tray instead of opening it — audio is live from the first second, the window appears only when you click the tray icon. It works on its own — you don't need Minimize to tray on close for it. With that one off, the tray icon exists only while the window is hidden at sign-in; once you open the window the icon goes away and ✕ asks whether to quit, as usual (turn Minimize to tray on close on if you want ✕ to send it back to the tray). Opening Aura Mixer yourself (Start menu, desktop shortcut) always shows the window, and the first-run setup still appears. Under the hood the sign-in entry starts Aura with an --autostart flag, which is how the two are told apart; Aura rewrites older entries in that format on its next launch.

Switching the toggle on/off updates Windows immediately; the registration also shows up under Startup apps in Windows settings, and the toggle re-syncs with whatever Windows says on each launch.

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