How to mute one app without muting your whole Mac

The mute key on a Mac keyboard, and the mute toggle in Control Center, both work on the whole system at once. There is no equivalent built into macOS for a single app. If you want a game, a notification sound, or a browser ad silenced while a call or your music keeps playing, macOS gives you exactly one lever, and it takes down everything with it.

This gets in the way constantly, because the moment it matters is rarely one where you want silence altogether. A stray notification chime lands mid-call. An ad starts playing in a background tab while you are listening to music in another. A game plays a loud jump-scare cue while you are also on a voice chat. In every case the actual problem is one app, not all sound, but the system-wide mute key cannot make that distinction.

What macOS's mute key actually mutes

Pressing the mute key sets the system output to zero. It is the same control the volume slider uses, just moved to its lowest point, and it has no idea which app is responsible for the sound that annoyed you. Music, calls, notifications and everything else drop out together, and stay dropped out until you press the key again, at which point whatever was making noise starts again too. There is no per-app equivalent hiding in Sound settings or Control Center: the system was not built with one.

The free option, if the noise is a browser tab

If the offending sound is coming from a tab rather than a standalone app, both major Mac browsers already solve this. In Chrome, right-click the tab and choose Mute Site. In Safari, a small speaker icon appears directly in the tab when it is playing audio, and clicking it mutes that tab specifically. Either way, that one tab goes quiet and every other tab, and every other app, keeps playing normally.

The limit is exactly where the browser stops. Tab muting only reaches inside that one browser window. A game, Slack, Discord, a standalone music app, or a second browser entirely are all outside its reach, and macOS has no matching control for any of them.

The other free option, and why it is more disruptive than it sounds

The remaining free route is to find the app itself and quit it, or pause whatever it is playing. This always works, because an app that has stopped running or stopped playing cannot make noise. The cost is that it also stops whatever else you were doing in it. Quit a game mid-session and you lose your place. Pause a call to stop its notification tone and you have paused the call. Hunting through a menu bar or a Dock to find the right app, while a sound is actively annoying you, is also slower than a mute should ever need to be.

Some apps do carry their own volume or mute control buried in their own preferences, but coverage is inconsistent and it means learning a different location for every app rather than having one place to look.

How Chorus mutes one app and leaves the rest alone

Chorus lists every app currently making sound in its own menu-bar panel, each with its own volume slider. Drag one app's slider to zero, or click its mute button, and that app goes silent immediately. Everything else keeps playing at exactly the level it was already at, because Chorus is changing that one app's own level rather than the system's. Bring it back by clicking mute again or moving the slider back up, and the app resumes at the level it was before.

Because the mute applies to the app itself rather than a tab or a window, it reaches further than browser tab muting does. A game, a chat app, a standalone music player, a second browser, anything currently playing sound shows up in the same list and mutes the same way. Nothing needs to be quit, and nothing needs pausing.

Where a fast, reversible mute actually matters

• A noisy game during a call. Mute the game's jump-scares and gunfire while a voice chat app stays audible, without alt-tabbing out and pausing anything.
• An ad playing in a background tab. If it is not the tab your browser itself can mute, or it is a second app entirely, muting it directly is faster than digging through tabs to find the source.
• A notification chime mid-recording or mid-call. Silence the app that keeps pinging without silencing the call itself or the music you are also listening to.
• Background downloads or updates that ping when finished. Mute the app once and the completion sound never interrupts anything again.

Each of these is a single app being loud at the wrong moment, not a reason to silence everything. A mute that reaches one app at a time is the difference between solving that and just working around it, and it costs nothing to try: every one of these situations is exactly what a per-app mute exists to fix, rather than something you have to work around with a quit or a pause.

None of this needs the app itself to build in a mute button of its own, the way a browser tab does. Chorus sits outside every app and adjusts its output directly, so a mute works the same whether the app has thought about the problem or not.

For every option available on a Mac, see Apple's own guide to notification settings.

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