macOS has no per-app volume mixer, so out of the box the only levers you get are the slider inside each app and the one system volume for everything else. To set a real volume per app you need a third-party mixer, and for most people that’s SoundSource. A free open-source utility covers the simple case for nothing. If the volume needs to differ from room to room, that’s a different job again.
Windows has had a per-app mixer for twenty years. Even an iPhone keeps the ringer and the media volume apart. On a Mac, one slider rules everything, so turning down a browser tab that started shouting at you takes your music with it.
Why can’t I set the volume for each app on a Mac?
Because macOS mixes every app’s sound together first, then sends the result to one speaker at one volume. The keys on your keyboard, the slider in Control Center and the Sound settings all move that same single volume.
Two things get mistaken for a per-app control. Some apps carry their own slider, and Music, Spotify and most video players do. That’s each app being polite rather than a system feature, and the tab playing an autoplay advert has no slider at all. The Sound settings look promising and aren’t: the output level and the microphone level are both system-wide, and the “alert volume” slider only touches things like the error beep.
For any tool to change one app’s volume, it has to catch that app’s sound before macOS blends it in, adjust it, and hand it back. That’s the trick all three options below pull, and it’s why each of them asks for a system permission the first time you open it. Intercepting another app’s audio is not something macOS lets anyone do quietly.
What can I do without installing anything?
Some habits get you surprisingly far, and they cost nothing.
- Use the in-app slider where there is one. Music down to 40%, system volume set wherever the video call needs it. Clumsy, free, works today.
- Mute the tab instead of the Mac. Safari and Chrome both mute individual tabs. It’s on or off rather than a volume, but it handles the most common offender.
- Send one app to headphones. Zoom and most audio apps let you pick which speaker they play to from inside their own settings. If the noisy one goes to headphones while everything else stays on the speakers, you’ve separated them without installing a thing.
If this problem turns up twice a month, stop here. If you’re fiddling with volumes every afternoon, a mixer is worth the ten minutes.
Which Mac apps add per-app volume control?
Three of them, and they were built for three very different houses. One costs nothing, one is the polished standard, and one only makes sense once you have speakers in more than one room.
SoundSource, the one to look at first
SoundSource, from Rogue Amoeba, is the established answer and a genuinely good piece of software. It’s a general audio control app: a volume for every app, a choice of which speaker each app plays to, and per-app equalizers and effects, including Audio Unit plug-ins, the Mac’s standard format for audio effects. It plays to AirPlay speakers as well. It’s a paid licence.
If you want to shape what you hear and not just turn it down, SoundSource is the tool. An equalizer sitting on your music player, a boost on quiet videos, a filter on one app and nothing else. Nothing else in this article comes close on that, and the wider comparison is in Airfoil alternatives for Mac, compared honestly.
A free utility, if you only need the sliders
There are small open-source menu bar apps whose entire job is a volume per app. FineTune is one: free, published on GitHub, a slider for each app plus an equalizer and a choice of which speaker everything goes to. It won’t keep several speakers in time with each other and there’s no phone remote, so if you play to one speaker and want nothing more, it costs you an afternoon at most to find out.
Check which version of macOS it supports before you download it. Upkeep on small open-source projects varies, and a mixer that has fallen behind the system is no mixer at all.
When the volume has to differ per room
The last option comes at the problem from somewhere else entirely. Audiout is a mixer for the whole house, built to play everything your Mac makes on every speaker you own at once, HomePods and Apple TVs and Sonos and Bluetooth speakers together. Per-app volume comes out of that design with a twist a single-speaker tool has nowhere to put: the same app can sit at two different volumes in two different rooms.
Route an app and it gets its own fader, a volume slider of its own. Route means telling the mixer where that app’s sound should go, and the moment Spotify is routed it stops taking orders from anything else. Apps you haven’t routed carry on exactly as before, following one Main Audio fader that sits over the lot as a ceiling. Every speaker gets a fader too, so the bedroom can come down while the kitchen stays where it is. Multi-room audio from a Mac is the planning side of that, and routing an app is the two-minute version. Sending two apps to two different speakers uses the same control the other way round, which different apps to different speakers on a Mac walks through.
One limit worth knowing up front: Chromecast speakers can join whole-house playback, but a single app can’t be sent to one on its own.
Which one should you pick?
Look at your speakers first. The answer usually falls out of how many there are.
One Mac, one speaker, and you just want the levels to behave: try the free utility this afternoon. If it holds, you’re done and you spent nothing.
You care how the sound itself feels: SoundSource. Per-app equalizers, effects and speaker choice in one well-made app from a developer who has been doing this on the Mac for a very long time. This is the deepest per-app control on the platform and it isn’t close.
Speakers in more than one room, and the question is where the sound goes as much as how loud it is: Audiout, €24.99 once, on a Mac with Apple Silicon running macOS 14.4 or later. The free 14-day trial of Audiout for Mac asks for no card and no email. If the multi-room half leaves you cold, buy the tool that matches the half you actually care about.
Whichever you land on, the job takes one evening of dragging sliders and then goes quiet for good. You bought the apps and you bought the speakers. They should be allowed to disagree about how loud they are.
Common questions
Why does a per-app volume app ask for a system permission on first launch?
Changing one app's volume means catching its sound before macOS blends everything together. macOS treats that as sensitive and makes you grant it by hand. Any tool that never asked would not be able to do the job.
Does turning an app down in a mixer affect what other people hear?
No. These mixers change what reaches your ears, nothing else. Pull Zoom down to 30% and the people on the call still hear you at full strength, because your microphone is untouched.
Can the same app play at two different volumes in two rooms?
Only with a mixer built for more than one speaker at a time. A single-speaker tool gives an app one volume, wherever that sound ends up. Audiout gives each routed app a fader per speaker, so the podcast can sit low in the office and loud in the kitchen.