Mac Audio for Online Music Lessons: DAW and Calls

You're in an online music lesson, teaching or learning. Your student plays through Zoom and you need to hear them clearly. GarageBand or Logic is playing a backing track, a metronome app is ticking, and Spotify has a reference recording queued. All of it shares one system volume. Turn up to hear your student and the metronome gets too loud. Turn the metronome down in its app and the backing track is suddenly too quiet to play along with.

What a lesson needs to sound like

• The other person comes first. You need to hear them well enough to catch timing and technique.
• The click is audible, not dominant. A metronome should sit under the playing.
• Backing tracks sit under the performance, not over it.
• Reference recordings play now and then, at a sensible level.

Each source has its own volume control (or none), and none of them know about each other.

Native steps first

1. Set up the call app for music

Video call apps are tuned for speech and can make instruments sound thin or cut out. Zoom has a setting for musicians in recent versions (look for 'Original sound for musicians' in Zoom's audio settings). Check your call app's audio settings for a music mode and turn off aggressive noise suppression.

2. Use each app's own volume

• Most DAWs, GarageBand and Logic included, have a master volume in the app: lower the backing track there.
• Many metronome apps have their own volume control.
• Spotify and Music have their own volume sliders.

This works, but you end up adjusting four or five apps in different places every time you switch from teaching to playing.

3. Use headphones

Headphones keep the backing track and metronome out of your microphone, so the other person hears you, not an echo of your own Mac.

Give each app its own slider

SoundDial, a per-app volume mixer for Mac puts a volume slider and a mute button for every running app in your menu bar, so the whole lesson mix is in one place.

An example while teaching:

• Zoom or FaceTime: 100%, the student is the priority
• Metronome app: lower, so the click is clear but not overpowering
• GarageBand or Logic: lower, so backing tracks sit under the playing
• Spotify: muted, unmuted for a moment when you play a reference
• Slack and Mail: muted, no interruptions during the lesson

If the student's audio is still too quiet with everything else down, you can boost the call app above 100%, up to 200%, without making the metronome or backing track louder. There's no limiter, so raise a boost in small steps.

One setting to check before a lesson: SoundDial's auto-ducking is on by default. While a call app such as Zoom or FaceTime uses the microphone, it lowers every other app, your DAW and metronome included, to 30% of their level. For lessons you'll usually want to turn auto-ducking off or set the duck level higher (up to 80%) in SoundDial's settings.

For your own practice afterwards, drag the sliders to new positions: metronome up, DAW up, chat apps still muted. To switch faster, save the teaching and practice mixes as profiles and click one to apply it to the apps that are running.

Good to know:

• It works per app, not per browser tab: if your lesson or metronome runs in a browser, all its tabs share one slider.
• It does not record anything.
• It needs macOS 14.2 or later and costs €14.99 one-time purchase on the Mac App Store, no subscription.

Related: Mac audio for music production and DAWs and Zoom call volume too low on Mac. More on per-app volume control on Mac.

Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store.