Still no.
But the reason changed.

Windows shipped a per-application volume mixer with Vista in 2007. You right-click the speaker icon, you get a fader per app, you turn the game down and leave the call alone. Nineteen years later, macOS still does not have one, and people switching platforms discover this within about a week.

The short answer has not changed in 2026. The interesting part is why, and what Apple did change instead.

What macOS gives you today

In System Settings → Sound, on macOS 26 Tahoe, you get:

• One output volume for the whole machine.
• A separate alert volume for system sounds — genuinely useful and genuinely underused.
• Output and input device selection.
• Per-app notification sound toggles, over in Notifications.

That is the complete list. There is no per-application volume anywhere in the operating system, and nothing in Tahoe added one. If an app does not ship its own volume slider — and many do not — the only control you have over it is the one that moves everything at once.

Why it is not simply a missing checkbox

On Windows, per-application audio sessions were a first-class concept from the start: the OS keeps a session per app and exposes it, so both the built-in mixer and any third-party app can use it.

Core Audio took a different shape. Every application's output is mixed into a shared path on the way to the hardware, and for most of macOS's history there was no public, sanctioned seam between an individual process and that path. Only the system could see it. That is not an oversight anyone forgot to fix — it is a design decision from the early 2000s, and it is why the fix, when it came, was a new API rather than a new preferences pane.

The workaround era, and what it cost

For twenty years the answer was a virtual audio driver: install a fake audio device, make macOS output to it, remix what comes out the other side. Soundflower pioneered it in 2004 and the pattern ran for two decades.

It worked, and the price was high:

• A system-level driver install and an administrator password.
• A restart — and on Apple silicon, often a trip into Recovery Mode to lower a security setting.
• Your default output device permanently changed to something fake, which broke in interesting ways whenever you plugged in headphones.
• Leftovers after uninstalling.
• A tendency to break on every major macOS release.

What actually changed: process taps

Apple shipped Core Audio process taps as a public API in macOS 14.2 (Sonoma, December 2023), with the developer tooling maturing by 14.4 in March 2024. A process tap lets a signed app capture the audio a specific process is producing — no virtual driver, nothing installed at the system level. Attach it to an aggregate device and you can change the gain, filter it, or send it somewhere else entirely, all in user space.

macOS gates it behind a one-time System Audio Recording permission prompt instead of a kernel extension approval flow. That single change is the difference between "install a driver, type your password, restart" and "open the app, click Allow."

Every current-generation per-app mixer on the Mac is built on this, MixPill included. It is the reason a whole category of apps appeared at once in 2024 and 2025 after twenty years of near-silence.

So is the problem solved?

Partly, and it is worth being precise about which parts.

• Solved: a fader per app, without touching your system. This is now a clean, supported thing to do.
• Solved: uninstalling. Nothing is left behind because nothing was installed at the system level. Move the app to the Trash and the Mac is as it was.
• Not solved: it is still third-party software. Apple has not shipped a mixer and shows no sign of doing so.
• Not solved: per-tab volume in a browser. Taps operate on a process, and a browser plays every tab through one audio path — that has to come from the browser itself. More on that in the Chrome article.
• Not solved: notification sounds macOS plays on an app's behalf, which sit outside that app's own audio path. See the Slack article for where that line falls in practice.

The honest caveat about new APIs

Process taps are only a couple of years old and Apple's documentation on them is thin. Every app in this category is building on ground Apple has not fully paved, and macOS 26.0 demonstrated the risk — it shipped with several audio capture regressions that were fixed in 26.1. Expect rough edges around major macOS releases sooner than you would with older, more settled APIs. That applies to MixPill as much as to anything else, and we would rather say it here than have you discover it.

The full list of what Tahoe broke and repaired is in the Tahoe article. If you are choosing between the tools that fill this gap, there is a comparison — written by us, so read it with that in mind; it says where the others are stronger.

Common questions