Mac Audio for Gaming: Game, Voice Chat and Music

You're deep in a match. Game audio is drowning out your teammates on Discord. You lower the system volume: now you can hear callouts, but the footsteps are too faint to react to. Meanwhile Spotify is still playing underneath everything. macOS gives you one slider for all of it.

Why gaming audio gets messy on Mac

A game mixes its own layers (dialogue, effects, ambience, music) into one stream. Voice chat in Discord, FaceTime or TeamSpeak adds a second stream. A music player adds a third. macOS sends them all to one output volume, with no built-in way to set them against each other.

Start with the game and voice chat settings

Before adding anything, use the controls you already have:

• In-game audio options. Most games have separate sliders for music, effects and dialogue. Turning the game's own music down or off often frees up a lot of room for voice chat. The downside is that changing them usually means leaving the game or opening its menu mid-session.
• Discord's own volume. Discord has an output volume slider in its Voice & Video settings, and you can right-click a single person to change their user volume. That helps when one teammate is much quieter than the others.
• Music player volume. Spotify and Music have their own slider. Set it low before you start playing.

What none of these do is let you raise Discord relative to the game from one place, without changing the system volume and affecting everything else. For a deeper look at that specific problem, see Game louder than Discord on Mac?

Per-app volume for gaming sessions

SoundDial gives each app its own volume slider in the menu bar, so you can set a gaming mix without digging through in-game menus or touching the system slider.

An example mix

• Game: 70%, loud enough for audio cues without overwhelming voice
• Discord or FaceTime: 100%, or boosted above 100% if callouts are still hard to hear
• Spotify or Music: 25%, in the background without competing
• Browser: muted, so no surprise tab audio
• Slack or Messages: muted, so no notification sounds mid-game

These are starting points, not rules. Set the levels by ear, and adjust them from the menu bar whenever a match gets loud. You set each slider, and it stays where you put it while you play. The one exception is auto-ducking: when a call app such as Discord or FaceTime uses the microphone, SoundDial lowers the other apps (the game included) to 30% of their level by default and restores them when the call ends. If you're in voice chat for a whole match, that may be more than you want; set the duck level higher (up to 80%) or turn auto-ducking off in SoundDial's settings. Your mix can also be saved as a profile and applied with one click.

What it can and can't do

• Volume per app from 0% to 200%, so you can lower the game or boost a quiet voice chat
• One-click mute per app while the others keep playing
• Works per app, not per browser tab: if you play a browser game and listen to music in another tab of the same browser, they share one slider
• macOS 14.2 or later

If you want to go further and separate game audio from Discord for streaming or recording, read separate game audio from Discord on Mac.

Get it

SoundDial, a per-app volume mixer for Mac costs €14.99 one-time purchase on the Mac App Store, no subscription. More on how it works: per-app volume control on Mac.

Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store.