How to lower Google Meet volume relative to your music on Mac

Google Meet has no volume control for incoming audio, and it runs inside your browser — so you can't lower the call from inside the call. The only way to make Meet quieter than your music on a Mac, without turning both down together, is a per-app volume mixer: give the browser (or the Meet PWA) and your music app their own levels, then hold the call at, say, 40% while music sits at 70%. macOS has no built-in way to do this.

It's a common, specific problem. You keep a low-stakes Meet running — a stand-up, a watch-along, a working call you're half-listening to — and you want music or a podcast on top of it. But every lever you reach for moves the wrong thing. The Mac volume keys duck the whole machine. Meet's own controls only mute you. And the browser's tab controls are all-or-nothing. Here's why, and the fix that actually holds a balance.

Why you can't just turn Meet down

Two facts stack up against you. First, Google Meet has no incoming-volume slider. You can mute your microphone, pin a speaker, or turn off your camera, but there is no control for how loud the other participants are. Meet assumes the call is the main event and hands the volume decision to your operating system.

Second, Google Meet isn't really an app — there's no native Mac client. It runs at meet.google.com in Chrome, Safari, or Edge, or as an installed Progressive Web App (a Chrome window without the tabs and address bar). Either way, the sound you hear is coming out of a browser process, mixed in with whatever else that browser is playing.

Now put those together with the last fact: macOS has one master output. The volume keys and the Sound menu set a single level for the whole Mac. There's no native per-app volume mixer like the Windows Volume Mixer. So "call quieter than music" is three volumes deep in a system that only exposes one. If you're wondering why that is, we covered the root cause in why turning down your Mac volume lowers everything at once.

The free workarounds, and where each one stops

Before installing anything, it's worth knowing the no-cost moves — because they get you partway, and knowing their limits is what makes the case for a mixer.

• Turn your music down instead of the call. Spotify, Apple Music, and web players have their own sliders. Nudging music down keeps Meet steady. This works when music is the thing you're happy to sacrifice — but it means every app you want above the call has to be adjusted by hand, one at a time, every time.
• Mute the Meet tab. In Chrome or Safari you can right-click the tab and mute it. That's a hard off, not a "quieter" — useless when you still want to half-hear the call. And if Meet is a PWA in its own window, there's no tab to mute.
• Lower the whole browser. If Meet is the only thing in that browser, dropping the browser's level lowers the call. But the moment a YouTube tab, a web player, or another PWA shares that browser, they duck with it.

Each of these is a real answer to a narrower question. None of them lets you set "Meet at 40%, music at 70%" and just leave it there. That's the gap.

The fix: give Meet and your music separate faders

A per-app volume mixer sits at the macOS audio layer and gives every running app — including the browser Meet lives in — its own independent level, from one place. This is the piece Apple never shipped. With it, the browser is one fader and Spotify is another, and they no longer move together. Set Chrome to 40%, Apple Music to 70%, and the call sits under the music exactly the way you wanted, for as long as you want.

A few apps do this. They agree on what they control and differ mostly on how fast you reach the control — which, for a level you nudge throughout a call, is the whole game.

Background Music is free and open source and will get the job done from a menu-bar list. SoundSource is a deep, polished tool with per-app EQ and routing built in — genuinely more powerful, and priced to match at $49. Fader's angle is narrower and cheaper: the fastest possible way to ride a level, from the keyboard, for $19.99 once.

Why the keyboard matters on a live call

On a call, the volume changes constantly. Someone starts screen-sharing and gets quiet; a loud talker joins; you want to bring music up during a lull and drop it when the discussion picks back up. A menu-bar mixer means going to the menu bar, clicking, finding the row, dragging, dismissing — five moves, every time, while you're supposed to be paying attention.

Fader's bet is that the fastest controller you own is the keyboard already under your hands. You tap a toggle hotkey, the keyboard becomes a mixer — one letter column is the browser Meet runs in, the next is Spotify — and you ride the balance with keystrokes without leaving the call window. Drop the call two notches, bring music up one, done, eyes never leaving the meeting. For a level you touch this often, that's the difference between a mixer you use and one you forget you installed.

Setting it up

The steps are the same whatever mixer you choose:

• Install the mixer and grant it the audio permission it asks for on first launch.
• Start (or join) your Google Meet in your browser, and start your music.
• Find the browser (Chrome, Safari, or the Meet PWA) and your music app in the mixer's app list — they each get their own fader once they're playing sound.
• Set the browser below your music. Around 40% call to 70% music is a good starting point; adjust to taste.
• In Fader, assign the browser and your music app to keyboard channels so you can nudge either one mid-call without reaching for the mouse.

One caveat worth naming: because Meet rides on the browser's fader, anything else in that same browser rides with it. If you keep a music web player in Chrome too, run it in a different browser or a native app so it gets its own level. If your real problem is one browser tab versus the rest of the browser, that's a slightly different setup — see controlling one browser tab's volume vs the whole browser on Mac.

Bottom line

Google Meet gives you no volume of its own and runs inside a browser, and macOS gives you one master level for the whole machine — so making the call quieter than your music isn't something you can do from inside either one. A per-app mixer is the fix: separate faders for the browser and your music app, set once and held. Background Music does it for free; SoundSource does it with more depth for $49. If what you want is to ride the call-versus-music balance from the keyboard while the meeting stays in front of you, that's the specific thing Fader is built for.