Spotify is louder
than everything else.

The complaint is oddly specific and extremely common: everything on the Mac is fine, and then Spotify starts and it is louder. Not slightly. Enough that you reach for the volume key every single time.

Spotify is genuinely doing something the rest of your apps are not, and there is a setting for it.

1. Spotify's volume level setting — the actual culprit

Open Spotify → Settings → Playback. Two controls matter:

• Audio normalisation — evens out the level difference between tracks so a quiet 1970s master and a modern loudness-war single arrive at roughly the same volume. Leave this on. Without it, "Spotify keeps changing volume between songs" is exactly what you get.
• Volume level: Quiet / Normal / Loud — this sets the target normalisation aims for. Loud pushes output hard, and it is why Spotify can feel like it is on a different scale from the rest of your Mac. Set it to Normal.

Loud also has a real audio cost beyond being loud: hitting a higher target means more limiting, so dynamics get squashed. Normal sounds better and stops the volume-key reflex at the same time.

2. Spotify's own in-app volume

The slider next to the playback controls is a separate stage from your system volume, and it is easy to leave somewhere odd — especially if you have ever used the keyboard shortcut while Spotify was focused. Set it to full and control the level elsewhere, or set it once deliberately and leave it alone. Having two volume stages you both fiddle with is how you end up confused.

3. Check whether it is really Spotify

Two things frequently masquerade as a Spotify problem:

• Bluetooth headphones in call mode. If something has grabbed your microphone — a meeting app idling, a browser tab with mic permission — many Bluetooth headsets drop into a low-bandwidth mode. Music sounds thin and quiet and no volume setting fixes it. Quit whatever holds the mic.
• A different output device than you think. Check System Settings → Sound. Spotify follows the system output, so if macOS quietly switched to the display's speakers when you plugged in a monitor, that is your answer.

4. When Spotify is fine and the relationship is the problem

Now the real case. Spotify at a good listening level and a Zoom call at a good listening level are not the same absolute level, and macOS's single volume control cannot hold both. Every time you fix one you break the other.

The general fix: give Spotify its own fader

Everything above is Spotify fixing Spotify. 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 Spotify to 40% and leave everything else alone. The level belongs to Spotify 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.

Two Spotify-specific wins from a per-app mixer

• EQ that only touches music. A 5-band EQ on the Spotify channel — a Bass Boost preset, or Night Mode late in the evening — leaves your system alerts, your call audio and your video at their normal balance. A system-wide EQ cannot do that; it colours notification sounds and voices too.
• It gets out of the way during calls. With Auto-Ducking on, Spotify drops to 20% the moment anything takes hold of an audio input and comes back when the call ends — so the answer to "Spotify is too loud" during meetings stops being something you have to do at all. That is written up in the Teams article.

Common questions