Free vs paid per-app volume apps for Mac: what you give up

There is a genuinely free per-app volume app for Mac — Background Music, open source under the GPL — and for many people it is enough. What you give up by choosing free over a paid mixer is not the core feature; it's the edges: polish and stability, clean behavior with every app, keyboard-driven speed, a real support line, and — with some "free" apps — the money anyway, because the volume mixing turns out to be behind a paywall. This guide lays out the trade honestly so you can pick on purpose.

macOS still ships no built-in per-app volume mixer, so every option here is third-party. The good news is that the free end of the market is real, not a trap in general. The bad news is that "free" hides a few different meanings, and the gap between the free and paid tools is less about the headline feature than about how it feels to live with. Let's separate the two.

What "free" actually gets you on a Mac

The honest free option is Background Music, a community project on GitHub, licensed under the GPL. It installs a virtual audio device, then shows a menu-bar list with a volume slider for every app that is making sound. You can turn Spotify down, leave a call at full, and it can even boost a quiet app past its normal maximum. For zero dollars, that is a lot of the job done.

BlackHole is also free and open source, but it is a different animal: a virtual audio cable, not a mixer. It gives you a route to build with — you wire it up in Audio MIDI Setup to capture or move audio — but there is no per-app slider and no UI to ride levels. It's a building block, not the finished tool. If you only need per-app volume, Background Music is the free app that actually does it.

The first thing you give up: sometimes nothing is free

eqMac is frequently listed as a free per-app volume app, and that one deserves a flag. eqMac's system equalizer is free, but its per-app volume mixer is part of a paid Pro tier — sold from roughly 3 US dollars a month or about 40 US dollars for a lifetime licence. So if per-app volume is your actual goal, eqMac is not a free way to get it. It's a capable EQ-first tool; just don't assume the volume mixing comes at no cost. That's the first "give up" to watch for: the free version that doesn't include the feature you came for.

What you give up with the genuinely free tools

Assume you go with Background Music, the real free mixer. Here is what you trade for the zero price, stated plainly:

• Polish and stability. The project still describes itself as alpha software. It works for lots of people, but it is community-maintained on volunteer time, with a backlog of open issues.
• Edge-case behavior. There are documented quirks — audible clipping when you push an app's volume past about 50 percent, stereo-only handling, and conflicts with a handful of specific apps. You may never hit them; you also can't file a ticket and expect a fix on a timeline.
• Interface and speed. It's a menu-bar list you reach with the mouse. Fine occasionally, slow if you change the mix constantly.
• Support and updates. No company behind it means no support SLA and no promise that the next macOS release won't break the virtual driver until a volunteer gets to it.

None of that makes it bad — it makes it free. The question is whether those edges land on you.

What paid actually buys you (and what it doesn't)

Paid mixers are not magically better at setting a volume — a slider is a slider. What the money buys is the parts around it. Both paid options here are one-time purchases, not subscriptions, so you compare them against the free tools once, not forever.

SoundSource by Rogue Amoeba is the deep one at 49 US dollars one-time. You get per-app volume, per-app output routing, and a per-app equalizer and effects chain, all from a polished menu-bar panel with real support behind it. If you want EQ and effects on individual apps, that breadth is the reason to pay more.

Fader is the lower-priced paid option at 19.99 US dollars one-time, with a 3-day free trial and no account. It narrows the job to per-app volume and output routing, and then does the thing the free tools and even SoundSource don't: it puts the controls on your keyboard. Hit a toggle hotkey and the letter keys become faders — the Q/A/Z column is one app, W/S/X the next — so you ride levels and mute apps without reaching for the menu bar at all. If you change the mix twenty times a day, that's the difference between a mixer you installed and a mixer you actually use. For a side-by-side with the free option, see Background Music vs Fader.

What paid doesn't buy you is a different result for a once-a-week adjustment. If you set a level and forget it, the free slider got you there too.

When free is the right call

Pick the free route when you adjust app volume rarely, you don't mind a dated interface and the occasional open-source rough edge, and you're comfortable installing a virtual audio driver from a community project. Background Music is a legitimate answer in that case, and it costs nothing to try. If you later find yourself fighting the UI or hitting a quirk at a bad moment, that's your signal the paid trade is worth it.

Pick paid when you ride levels constantly, you want it to keep working across macOS updates with someone to email when it doesn't, or you want the speed of doing it from the keyboard. And if you're mainly trying to spend as little as possible, the full cost ladder — free through premium — is laid out in the cheapest way to get per-app volume on Mac.

Bottom line

Free per-app volume on a Mac is real: Background Music does the core job for nothing. What you give up is the surrounding experience — polish, clean app compatibility, speed, support — and, with apps like eqMac, sometimes the money anyway once the mixer turns out to be a paid tier. If those edges don't touch you, free is a fine answer. If they do, a one-time purchase fixes them permanently — and if the edge you care about is speed, the keyboard-driven one is Fader.