How to lower Discord volume but keep your game loud on Mac

To lower Discord without touching your game on a Mac, open Discord's User Settings → Voice & Video and drop the Output Volume — that quiets only what Discord plays. If it's one loud friend, right-click their name in the voice channel and lower just their slider. Both are free and built in. Where they run out is speed: to re-balance Discord against the game mid-match without alt-tabbing to a menu, you need a per-app mixer that puts both apps on one set of controls.

It's the classic squad-night problem. Your friends come through Discord at full blast, footsteps and gunfire in the game are buried underneath, and reaching for the Mac volume keys just turns the whole thing down together. macOS gives you one master output that sits in front of every app, so the volume keys can't say "Discord down, game where it is." The fix is to work at the app level instead.

Fastest fix: lower Discord's own output

Discord has a volume control of its own, and it only affects Discord. Open Discord, click the gear (User Settings) near your name, choose Voice & Video, and pull the Output Volume slider down. Voices get quieter; your game doesn't move because the game is a separate app with its own level. This is the right first move whenever Discord as a whole is too loud.

One thing to know: this slider covers voice chat, but Discord's interface sounds — the join/leave blips, mute clicks, incoming call ringtones — are governed separately under Notifications and the sound toggles in Voice & Video. If it's those pings cutting through and not the talking, turn the specific sounds off there rather than dragging the output slider to zero.

If it's one loud person, not all of Discord

Often the whole channel is fine and a single friend is clipping. You don't need to quiet everyone for that. In the voice channel, right-click that person's name and use the per-user volume slider in the menu — it sets their level for you only, and it sticks. That leaves the rest of the squad and your game exactly where they were. It's the most surgical of the built-in options and costs nothing.

The other direction: the game is drowning Discord

Sometimes the fix isn't lowering Discord but keeping the game from burying it. Most games have an in-app master or effects slider in their audio settings — drop that and Discord voices come back up in the mix relative to the game. The snag is that not every Mac game exposes a usable slider, and even when they do, it's buried in a settings screen you have to pause and dig into. That's fine to set once before a session; it is not something you want to do in the middle of a firefight.

Where the built-in route runs out

Add the four fixes up and the pattern is clear: each app has its own slider in its own place, and none of them talk to each other. Balancing Discord against the game means alt-tabbing out of full-screen, opening one app's settings, adjusting, tabbing back — then doing it again the other way when the mix shifts. During a match that's exactly the moment you can't spare. And any app without a slider of its own — a stray Electron app, a background music player, a browser tab — has no built-in level at all.

What macOS never shipped is a single mixer where every running app has its own fader. That's a real gap, and it's the same gap whether you're gaming, on calls, or riding a meeting against your music. Third-party tools fill it, and they differ mostly in how fast you can reach the control once it's set.

The keyboard-fast fix: one fader per app

A per-app mixer sits at the audio layer and gives Discord and your game each their own level in one place — the panel Apple left out. Tools here include Background Music (free, open source), SoundSource by Rogue Amoeba (a deep menu-bar mixer, $49 one-time as of version 6), and Fader (paid, keyboard-first). They all set per-app volume; the difference you feel is how long it takes to get there.

Fader's whole bet is that the fastest controller you own is already under your hands. You hit a toggle hotkey, the keyboard becomes a mixer — one letter column is Discord, the next is the game — and you ride both levels with keystrokes without ever leaving full-screen. Discord creeping up? Tap it down two notches and keep playing. It also handles the apps with no slider of their own, since it works on whatever is producing sound, not on whether the app bothered to add a volume control.

If you'd rather not pay, Background Music genuinely does the job — it's a solid free per-app mixer, and for a set-and-forget balance it's plenty. What you trade is the reach: a menu-bar list you click into versus a keystroke from inside the game. For a mix you touch constantly, that reach is the difference between a mixer you use and one you forget is installed. And if you also stream or record, it's worth reading the full streamer's Mac audio setup before you buy anything.

Bottom line

For Discord being too loud on its own, the free fix is the right one: lower Discord's Output Volume in Voice & Video, or right-click a single loud friend. For balancing Discord against the game — over and over, in the middle of play, without alt-tabbing — the built-in controls run out, because macOS has no one place to ride both. A per-app mixer is the fix, and if reaching the control in a keystroke matters, that's exactly what Fader is built for.