How to Control the Volume of Individual Apps on a Mac (2026 Guide)
You are listening to one thing. Six other apps did not get the memo. Your Mac gives you a single volume slider for everything, which is fine until a Slack ping blasts over your music or a game drowns out the friend you are talking to. Here is how to give every app its own volume, including the honest free routes and the cheap no-driver one.
Why your Mac only has one volume slider
Open your menu bar, drag the volume slider, and every app on the machine moves together. Chrome, Discord, Spotify, Zoom, that game in the background: all of it, one slider. macOS has no built-in per-app volume mixer. It never has.
This is not a small oversight. It is one of the longest-running requests Apple has. One thread in the Apple Community asking for per-app volume has racked up 466 "Me Too" votes and still no native answer. People want this badly.
What makes it sting is that other platforms solved it years ago. Windows ships a volume mixer right in the taskbar, and the free EarTrumpet utility makes it even nicer. Android has had per-app streams forever. On a Mac, the moment you run more than one thing that makes noise, you are stuck riding a single fader for the whole system. If you are building, testing, or just running a lot at once, that is not enough.
The thing most people get wrong: Focus mode does not do this
Here is the trap. You go looking for a fix, you find macOS Focus modes, and you think "great, I will just turn on Focus and the noise stops." It does not work like that.
Focus modes silence notifications. Banners, badges, the little ping sounds. That is their whole job. They do nothing to the audio an app is actively playing. Turn on a Focus, and your Spotify track keeps going at full volume, your YouTube video keeps blaring, your game keeps roaring. Focus mutes the doorbell, not the stereo.
So if you searched "mute background apps macOS" and landed on a Focus tutorial, that is why it felt wrong. You need something that touches actual playback volume, per app. That is a different category of tool.
How to actually control per-app volume on a Mac
You have real options, free and paid. Here is the honest version of each, ranked roughly from "free but fiddly" to "just works."
The free routes
Background Music is free, open source, and genuinely clever. It gives you per-app volume and can auto-pause your music when other audio plays. The catch: it installs a virtual audio driver and routes your whole system through it, which means it asks for microphone-style permission and becomes the thing your sound depends on. On Apple silicon the support is rough. The project itself flags newer Macs as "not tested." If you like tinkering and do not mind a driver sitting in your audio path, it is a real free option. If you want something you can forget about, it is a lot of moving parts.
eqMac is a free, polished system equalizer, and it is great at that. But the part you came for, the per-app "Volume Mixer," is locked behind a paid Pro subscription. So "free" gets you a system-wide EQ, not the per-app sliders. Worth knowing before you download it expecting a mixer.
The paid routes
SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba (around $49) is the heavyweight: per-app volume, a full per-app equalizer, and audio routing to send apps to different outputs. If you want a deep pro audio toolkit and the price does not faze you, it is excellent. We even wrote a whole SoundSource alternative breakdown if you want the full comparison.
Sound Control from Static Z (around $15 to $25) is another solid paid option, actively maintained, with per-app volume and EQ. If you want a middle ground with EQ included, it is worth a look.
Levels: the simple, no-driver pick
If you do not need a full EQ or audio-routing suite, and you do not want a subscription or a virtual driver in your sound path, this is where Levels comes in. It does the one thing the others bury under features: it gives every Mac app its own volume slider and a mute button. That is it, and that is the point.
- No driver, no kernel extension. Levels uses Apple's own Core Audio process taps. There is nothing system-level to install, and nothing to uninstall later. It is one lightweight menu-bar app.
- Bit-perfect passthrough. Apps you leave at full volume are not touched at all. Levels only processes the apps you actually turn down or mute, so it stays out of the way of everything else.
- Fully on-device. No account, no telemetry, no servers. Your audio never leaves your Mac.
- A focus hotkey that actually mutes audio. Press ⌘⌥M and every app except the one in front goes silent. More on that below.
- Saveable profiles. Set up a Work scene, a Call scene, a Playtest scene, and switch between them in a click.
Levels is a signed and notarized direct download (not on the Mac App Store). It runs on macOS 15 and later on Apple silicon. It is $9.99 one time, no subscription, with a free 14-day full trial so you can confirm it works on your exact setup before you pay a cent.
Give every app its own volume.
Levels is a one-time $9.99. No subscription, no driver, no account. The free trial is the whole app, so try it on a genuinely noisy afternoon and decide.
How do I... (the actual tasks people search)
Enough background. Here is how to do the specific things you came here for.
Turn one app down without touching system volume
Classic case: a video is playing and it is perfect, but Spotify is too loud underneath it. With the built-in slider you cannot win, because moving it moves both. With a per-app mixer you open the menu, find Spotify, and pull its slider down. The video stays exactly where it was. Your system volume never moves. In Levels, that is two seconds: turn Spotify down, keep the video loud, done.
Mute background apps, or mute everything except the app you are using
This is the one the single slider can never do, and it is the reason a lot of people install Levels. Hit ⌘⌥M and everything except the app in front drops to silence. Tab over to another app and the audible one follows you, so whatever you are looking at is what you hear. Press ⌘⌥M again and every app returns to exactly the level it was at before, untouched. It is the fastest way to kill background noise without hunting through a dozen sliders, and the cleanest answer to "mute all apps except one" on a Mac.
Separate Discord and game volume
Gaming with friends is the textbook fight. The game wants to be loud. Your friend on Discord is now a tiny voice somewhere under an explosion. With one system slider you cannot fix the balance, you can only make the whole thing quieter. With per-app volume you set the game to a comfortable level, push Discord up so you can actually hear people, and leave it. Want it permanent? Save it as a Playtest profile and load it the next time you sit down to play.
FAQ
Does macOS have a built-in volume mixer like Windows?
No. macOS has a single system volume slider that moves every app at once. There is no built-in per-app mixer like the Windows volume mixer or its EarTrumpet utility. To get per-app sliders you need a third-party app such as Levels, SoundSource, or Sound Control.
Can I change the volume of one app without changing system volume on Mac?
Yes, but not with the built-in controls. With a per-app volume app like Levels you get a separate slider for each app, so you can turn Spotify down while a video keeps playing at full volume. Your system volume never moves.
Do Focus modes control app volume on a Mac?
No. macOS Focus modes silence notifications and banners. They do not lower or mute the audio that apps are actively playing. A song or a video keeps playing at full volume with Focus on. To mute apps you need a per-app volume tool.
How do I mute every app except the one I am using?
Levels has a focus-mode hotkey, ⌘⌥M. Press it and every app except the one in front goes silent. Switch apps and the audible one follows you. Press it again and everything returns exactly as it was.
Is there a free way to control per-app volume on Mac?
Yes. Background Music is free and open source but installs a virtual audio driver and asks for microphone-style permission, and its Apple silicon support is rough. eqMac is free as a system EQ, but its per-app Volume Mixer is locked behind a paid Pro subscription. Levels is paid at $9.99 once but uses no driver and offers a free 14-day trial.
The short version
macOS still ships one volume slider for your entire Mac, and Focus mode will not save you because it only mutes notifications. The free tools work but come with drivers, permissions, or a paywall on the exact feature you want. If you just want every app to have its own slider and a real focus hotkey, with no driver, no account, and no subscription, grab the free 14-day trial of Levels and try it on your own apps. If it earns its place, it is $9.99 to buy, once, and it is yours.