Quiet control for the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro II on Windows and Linux, in place of Swarm II. No driver, no Turtle Beach software, no admin rights.
Turt is a fork of Neap by lykosapps, with a few additions of its own: a battery in the notification area, automatic switching of Windows' sound devices, a frosted glass mini panel with its own shortcut, and a Mode button that can skip "off". Everything else is Neap's work, under the same licence.
Download the latest release · Windows 10 version 2004 or later, 64-bit · Linux, 64-bit, on any desktop with PulseAudio or PipeWire
For the Stealth Pro II only, for now. Tested on the Xbox edition. The PlayStation edition should work but hasn't been tried, so reports are welcome.
Own another Turtle Beach headset? Help bring it to Turt and Neap. The Stealth 600 Gen 3, 700 Gen 3, 500 and Atlas Air share the Stealth Pro II's platform. A ten-minute recording made in Turt is where support for them, and for other headsets that work with Swarm II, starts. Nothing else to install, and no technical knowledge needed. Here's how.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Turtle Beach. Turtle Beach, Stealth Pro II and Swarm II are trademarks of Turtle Beach Corporation.
The icon in the notification area can show the headset's battery: a battery filled to the charge, the charge as a number, or a headset with either in its corner. Choose it in Settings → System tray icon, or keep Turt's own icon. It turns orange at 25% and red at 15%, the battery shows a bolt while charging, and the headset styles show a faint, struck-through headset while it's disconnected. Hovering over it still says the charge in words.
With Automatic device switch on, Windows makes the headset the default speaker and microphone, for calls too, when it connects, and puts back the devices used before when it's switched off or out of range. Settings can name other devices to go back to instead. It's on by default.
A click on the icon by the clock opens the mini panel for mid-game: the mix, microphone mute, noise control, spatial sound and the equaliser preset. In Turt it can be drawn as frosted glass, after the Frosty Glass taskbar theme, with the desktop showing through it, blurred, under a tint. Settings chooses between it and the standard look, and frosted glass is the default. On Linux the glass is solid.
- Its own shortcut. Ctrl + Alt + M opens and closes it, by the clock on the screen whose taskbar holds it, and can be changed beside the mix's shortcuts.
- It fades up into place as it opens and away as it closes. With "Show animations in Windows" off, it appears and goes at once.
- A theme of your choosing. Settings can follow the system, or stay light or dark, and the mini panel follows it.
The headset's Mode button can step between noise cancellation and transparency only, skipping off. Choose it on Controls. Like the usual three-step cycle, it works while Turt is running.
The screenshots below were taken in Neap, before the new name and logo.
Pick the apps that carry chat, such as Discord or Teams, and Turt turns them against everything else. No virtual audio cable, driver or reboot, and it works on the Xbox edition, where Swarm II's mix isn't officially supported.
Move it with the headset's chat wheel, the dial on Home, or the keyboard from inside a game: Ctrl + Alt + Page Down, Page Up and Home, all rebindable. On Windows, a meter for each side shows chat speaking and the game's sound as you set it.
Choose noise cancellation, transparency or off. The headset has no transparency mode of its own; transparency is noise cancellation at zero, which lets the room in. The Mode button steps through all three while Turt is running, or between noise cancellation and transparency only.
- Parametric equaliser for game audio: up to four adjustments, fitted to the headset's ten bands, with a plot of what you'll actually hear.
- Test tone. Find a frequency that stands out, then cut or boost it on the spot.
- Try things freely. Drag the points or use the keyboard, hold Compare to hear the headset flat, and undo any change.
- Presets stored on the headset, for game and microphone, so they also appear in the phone app and survive uninstalling everything.
Save your whole setup under a name, from noise cancellation to both equalisers. Give a profile one or more games, and it comes on when one of them starts, then goes back to your default when it closes. A call app such as Teams can switch only while it's using the microphone, so its profile is on for calls.
See the headset's battery and whether the spare in the dock is charging, set the brightness of both lights, and choose the audio format. The dock's level is only reliable once the spare is full, so while it charges Turt says so with a bolt instead of a number, and a battery just put in the headset reads "Settling…" until its reading steadies.
- The microphone follows the headset. Muted by the boom arm or the mute button, it is muted on the PC too, and unmuted with it.
- Louder than the headset's maximum. A loudness boost on the Audio page raises the headset's own level, for when it is too quiet even at full volume.
- Clear status. Connected, no sound, off or out of range, each with what still works and the one thing to do.
- Catches the wrong device. When your system sends sound or the microphone somewhere the headset isn't listening, Turt names the right one.
- Settings Swarm II's desktop app doesn't have: wake on motion and voice prompt volume.
- Every other setting the headset has: microphone, noise gate, Superhuman Hearing, buttons and dial, lighting and power. On Windows also spatial sound and the audio format.
- Runs from the notification area, with the mix and chat wheel still working, and can start when you sign in. On a desktop with no notification area, such as GNOME without its extension, closing the window closes Turt.
- Tells you when there's a newer version. Turt asks GitHub once a day, and on Windows updating is one button in Settings; on Linux it opens the download page. It sends nothing from your computer or headset, only the request, which GitHub sees as any website does, and the check can be turned off.
- Works from the keyboard and with screen readers, in light, dark and high contrast themes.
The changelog has the full list, and what's not included.
- From the latest release,
download
Turt-<version>-win-x64.zip. - Unzip it to a folder of its own, such as
C:\Users\<you>\Apps\Turt. - Run
Turt.exe. - Close Swarm II and remove the Waves audio driver, as described in Alongside Swarm II.
The download is not signed yet, so the first time, Windows says it protected your PC. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
It needs nothing else: no .NET runtime, no driver. That makes it about 130 MB on disk.
To update, choose Update and restart at the top of Turt's settings when a newer version is out. Turt checks once a day and says so by the clock. Settings are kept. To update by hand instead, or from 0.1.0, close Turt from the notification area, replace the contents of its folder with the new release, and run it again.
To remove it, turn off Start when you sign in in its settings if you
turned it on, close it from the notification area, and delete its folder
and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Neap, where it keeps its settings and log. The folder
keeps Neap's name, so settings carry over from Neap.
To check a download, each release is built on GitHub from the tagged
commit and has a .sha256 file beside the zip. Compare it with:
Get-FileHash Turt-<version>-win-x64.zip
- From the latest release,
download
Turt-<version>-x86_64.AppImage. - Make it runnable: in a terminal,
chmod +x Turt-<version>-x86_64.AppImage, or in your file manager tick Allow executing as a program. Then run it. - If Turt says it isn't allowed to use the headset, choose Allow access.
Your system asks for your password once; the only thing it changes is a
small rule file,
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-neap.rules, that lets you use the headset. If there's no password prompt, Turt gives you the command to run yourself.
It is one file with everything inside it, and runs on any 64-bit distribution
whose desktop has PulseAudio or PipeWire. If it says it needs FUSE, install
libfuse2 from your distribution, or run it as
./Turt-<version>-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run.
The download is not signed. Each release has a .sha256 file beside it; check
it with sha256sum -c Turt-<version>-x86_64.AppImage.sha256.
To update, Turt tells you when a newer version is out and opens the download page. Download the new file and use it in place of the old one. Settings are kept. If you turned on Start when you sign in, run the new file once and it points the sign-in entry at itself.
To remove it, turn off Start when you sign in in its settings if you
turned it on, close Turt, and delete the file and ~/.local/share/Neap, where
it keeps its settings and log. If you allowed access, delete
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-neap.rules too.
What isn't there yet on Linux: Gaming Mode on the Steam Deck (use desktop mode), and spatial sound and the audio format (Windows' own). The keyboard shortcuts work while a program on X, which is most games, is in front, and not over a native Wayland program.
Swarm II only runs on Windows, so this is for Windows. Linux has nothing to close or remove.
- Keep Swarm II, for firmware updates and pairing. Turt deliberately does neither.
- Make sure Swarm II isn't running in the background. The two apps fight over the headset when both are open. In Swarm II: Settings (the cog, bottom left) → App Settings → turn off Autostart Swarm II, then close it, including from the notification area. Open it only for a firmware update, and close it again afterwards.
- Remove the Waves audio driver. Turt's mix doesn't need it. In Windows Settings → Apps, uninstall Turtle Beach Audio Driver by Waves Audio Ltd, and don't reinstall it from Swarm II's driver menu.
Working and in daily use, but young. Everything has been exercised on one headset: on one Windows PC, and on a Steam Deck's desktop for Linux. Other Linux distributions and desktops (Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE families, KDE, no-notification-area GNOME) have been run only against a pretend headset, not a real one, and a Wayland-only desktop and a screen reader on Linux haven't been tried. There is no installer yet, and it was written with AI assistance.
Found a problem with something Turt adds? Open an issue on Turt. In Settings → Problems and other headsets you can record while it happens; its Report on GitHub button still opens an issue on Neap, which is the right place for problems Neap has too. Have another Turtle Beach headset that works with Swarm II? Help support it. For a security problem, see SECURITY.md.
- CONTRIBUTING.md: building, testing, and the checks that need a headset
- FINDINGS.md: the headset's protocol and behaviour, as measured
- ARCHITECTURE.md: the two halves, and why the audio one is the awkward part
- BACKLOG.md: bugs, features and work still to do
One app, drawn the same on both systems (Avalonia):
dotnet publish src/Neap.Desktop -c Release -r win-x64 -f net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0 --self-contained
dotnet publish src/Neap.Desktop -c Release -r linux-x64 -f net10.0 --self-contained
Run Neap.Desktop.exe (Windows) or Neap.Desktop (Linux) from the publish
folder. A release renames the Windows file Turt.exe, which the updater in
every installed copy looks for. You need the .NET 10 SDK to build, but not to
run the result. The Windows build can only be made on Windows; the Linux one
builds on either. To make the Linux AppImage from a Linux publish folder, see
packaging/linux/build-appimage.sh.
Neap.Probe is a console harness that talks to the headset without a
UI, on Windows or Linux. It is how the protocol was worked out and it is still
the fastest way to see what the hardware is actually saying:
dotnet run --project src/Neap.Probe -c Release -- read
devices, read, named, registry, presets, transmitters, json,
watch, diff, audio and route are the ones worth knowing — route
says where Windows sends sound and takes the microphone from, for each of its
roles, and which of the headset's devices is carrying sound right now. The
ones that ask Windows about sound (audio, route, hear, formats and a
few more) run only on Windows; on Linux, sound asks the sound server in
their place, and most of the others run on both.
A few more matter when something is not behaving:
raw [seconds] [usage page]prints every report as it arrives, decoded or not, and does not require the device to answer a command first. It listens for what the device pushes and asks for what it answers, and labels which path saw each report — a path that cannot see anything says so rather than going quiet. Usage page000cis where the volume wheel pushes its clicks; the chat wheel reports on the settings channel, through whichever transmitter is carrying the headset's controls.whoasks every transmitter plugged in, separately, which one is carrying the headset's controls. With two plugged in, the answer is not always the one playing the sound.hear <output>plays a soft beep on one output every three seconds and prints each of the headset's microphones' levels, second by second. It is for what a default device cannot tell you: whether a device reaches the headset at all, and which microphone actually hears you.decode <file.pcap>reads a USBPcap recording of Swarm II driving the headset and prints every command and reply, naming the ones in the registry. This is how anything new gets learned — the registry was built by watching the vendor's app. Capture withtools/capture.ps1.
Read-first. The client writes nothing unless it is made with writes allowed, and even then it sends only settings in the confirmed registry, within their confirmed ranges. The one write known to cause harm, a transmitter slot's base address, is refused outright. Nothing touches the firmware update path, which is signed and encrypted.
One warning worth repeating from the findings: a transmitter will answer questions about a headset it can no longer reach, with stale values, and the chip vendor's own firmware commands reach only the USB device you are plugged into, never the headset behind it. Confirm which device answered before trusting a result.
Turt is built on Neap, written by
lykosapps: the protocol work, the mix, the equaliser, profiles and nearly
everything described above come from it. The source still uses Neap's
project names (Neap.Desktop, Neap.Core and so on) to stay close to it,
and changes here are offered back to Neap where they fit.
Copyright (C) 2026 lykosapps
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See LICENSE for the full text.
The third-party components it uses keep their own licences; see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.