One browser tab,
louder than the room.

An autoplaying ad in a background tab at full volume during a meeting is a specific kind of misery, and it exposes something worth understanding: on a Mac, "turn down YouTube" and "turn down Chrome" are two different problems with two different solutions.

The distinction that explains everything

A browser plays every tab through a single audio path. macOS sees one application producing sound, not thirty tabs. So:

• Per-tab control has to come from the browser. Only the browser knows which tab is which.
• Per-app control has to come from outside the browser, and macOS does not provide it — one system volume, moving everything at once.

Both are solvable. They just need different tools.

Per tab: what the browser gives you

• Chrome — right-click the tab and choose Mute Site. The tab shows a speaker indicator whenever it is producing sound, which is also how you find the tab that started playing something you did not ask for.
• Safari — a speaker icon appears in the tab and in the address bar. Click to mute that tab; press and hold for the option to mute every other tab instead, which is the faster move when you are hunting.
• YouTube's own player volume — separate again, and it multiplies with everything downstream. Player at 30%, browser turned down, macOS at half, and you end up inaudible with three sliders to investigate. Leave the player near full and control level in one place.
• Autoplay — Safari's Settings → Websites → Auto-Play can be set to "Never Auto-Play" per site or as a default, which removes the whole category of surprise. It is one of the more underused settings on a Mac.

There are browser extensions that add a real per-tab volume slider rather than just mute. They work, and it is worth being aware that a volume extension needs permission to run on the pages it controls — decide what you are comfortable with.

Per app: turning the whole browser down

This is the case per-tab controls cannot reach. You are in a call, or listening to something, and you want the browser as a whole to sit lower than everything else — not muted, just quieter — permanently, without touching your call audio.

The general fix: give Chrome its own fader

Everything above is Chrome fixing Chrome. The reason you keep running into this is more basic: macOS has exactly one volume, and it moves everything at once. Windows has had a per-application volume mixer since 2007. macOS never shipped one, and it is not an oversight Apple is quietly working on — it is a consequence of how Core Audio was built.

What changed is that in 2024 Apple shipped Core Audio process taps as a public API, which lets a signed app capture and adjust the audio of one specific process in user space. No virtual audio driver, no kernel extension, no restart, and no swapping your default output device for a fake one. That is what MixPill is built on, and it is why the setup is a single macOS permission rather than an installer and a reboot. The longer version is in why macOS has no volume mixer.

In practice: every app currently making sound gets a row with a fader, a mute, a solo and a live dBFS meter. Set Chrome to 40% and leave everything else alone. The level belongs to Chrome and persists, so you set it once. Unity sits at 80% of the fader travel with up to +6 dB above it, so an app that is too quiet can be pushed up rather than only down — which is half the reason people go looking for a mixer in the first place.

All of that is free, for unlimited apps, permanently — no trial clock and no nag screens. Pro adds per-app EQ and a noise gate, per-app output routing, presets, and Auto-Ducking that drops everything else to 20% whenever a call takes hold of an audio input.

The one thing to watch with browsers

Because a per-app fader moves the whole browser, it also moves a Google Meet call running in a tab, and any browser-based conferencing you use. If that matters to you, the standard trick is to keep browser calls in a second browser — Safari for calls, Chrome for everything else, or the reverse — so the two get independent faders.

The same logic explains a question that comes up constantly about Netflix on a Mac: there is no Netflix app, so every Netflix volume question is really a browser volume question. That one has its own article, because Netflix adds a problem browsers do not — film dynamic range, where dialogue is inaudible and the next scene is deafening.

Common questions