Spotify, mid-Teams call, at full volume.

You are in a Teams call. Spotify is still going from before the call, sitting somewhere between "distracting" and "everyone can hear it." You reach for the volume key, and now the call is quiet too. You mute Spotify by hand, get through the meeting, and forget to unmute it for the rest of the afternoon.

This is not a Teams bug and it is not something Microsoft is going to patch. It is a gap in macOS, and there are three separate places to attack it.

Why Teams can duck Spotify on Windows and not on your Mac

Windows has had per-application audio sessions since Vista in 2007. Any app can ask the operating system for a handle on another app's volume, which is why Windows has a volume mixer, why Discord's attenuation setting works there, and why Teams on a PC can politely lower everything else when a call starts.

macOS has never had that API. Core Audio mixes every application's output into a shared path on the way to the hardware, and for most of macOS's history there was no sanctioned way for one app to see — let alone adjust — another app's level. Teams on macOS is not choosing not to duck Spotify. It has nothing to call. The full story of why, and what changed in 2024, is in the background guide.

Fix 1 — the free settings, first

Some of this problem is self-inflicted, and costs nothing to fix.

• Check Spotify's volume level setting. Spotify → Settings → Playback has an audio normalisation toggle and a volume level of Quiet, Normal or Loud. Loud pushes output hard enough that Spotify genuinely is louder than the rest of your Mac. Normal is the sane default; there is more on this in the Spotify levels article.
• Raise Teams instead of lowering everything. Teams has its own speaker level in Settings → Devices. If the call is loud enough on its own, Spotify at the same absolute volume becomes background rather than competition.
• Pull down the alert volume. System Settings → Sound has an Alert volume slider independent of your main output. Notification chimes are usually a bigger share of "my Mac is noisy during calls" than people expect.
• Turn on a Focus during meetings. It stops banners and their sounds. It does nothing to audio already playing, but it removes one category of interruption for free.

Fix 2 — a fader per app, moved by hand

The direct fix for "Spotify is too loud relative to Teams" is a volume control that belongs to Spotify alone. That is what a per-app mixer is: a list of every app currently producing sound, each with its own fader and mute.

In MixPill this part is free, permanently, for unlimited apps — pull Spotify to 30%, leave Teams where it is, and the system volume key still does what it always did. Levels are per app and they persist, so Spotify stays at the level you left it at next time it plays.

The faders are also calibrated rather than arbitrary: unity sits at 80% of the travel, with up to +6 dB of gain above that, so an app that is genuinely too quiet can be pushed up rather than only down. Every channel shows a true dBFS meter with a −12 dB reference tick, which turns "is Spotify actually louder or does it just feel louder" into something you can see.

Setup is one permission and no restart — no audio driver, no system extension, and your default output device never changes.

Fix 3 — have it happen without you

Moving a fader before every call is still a thing you have to remember. The version that survives a busy week is automatic.

MixPill's Auto-Ducking watches for any process on your Mac taking hold of an audio input — that is what joining a Teams call does — and drops every other channel to 20% for as long as it lasts. Leave the call, and everything climbs back. Because the trigger is the audio input rather than a list of app names, it behaves the same for Teams, Zoom, Meet in a browser tab, FaceTime, a Slack huddle, or whatever your company migrates to next.

It does this without ever asking for microphone permission: MixPill asks Core Audio which processes hold an input rather than opening one itself. Ducking is a Pro feature; there is a 7-day trial with no account and no card if you want to see whether it survives a real week of meetings before deciding.

If you also share your screen with sound

One more thing worth knowing, because it catches people: when you share system audio into a Teams or Zoom call, the far end hears the audio your Mac is producing. Ducking changes what you hear locally. If you are sharing a video into a call and it sounds wrong on the other end, check what the sharing setting is capturing before you start moving faders — those are two different signal paths, and confusing them leads to a lot of pointless adjustment.

And if the problem turns out to be what your microphone is picking up rather than what your speakers are playing, none of the above applies — see the noise article instead.

Common questions