Push-to-mute for any app on your Mac

macOS has no built-in push-to-mute for a single app. The native mute key and the Sound menu only move one master level, so hitting mute silences everything at once — there's no way to tell the system "cut just this app on one keystroke." To push-to-mute any single app, from inside any other window, you bind a global mute hotkey to that app with a per-app mixer. This guide covers what push-to-mute really means on a Mac, the honest difference between hold-to-mute and tap-to-mute, and how to set it up.

The want is simple. Your boss's name pops up in the meeting, or someone walks into the room, and you need one app — the YouTube tab, the game, the podcast — gone now, without ducking the call you're on or hunting for the right window. On Windows that's a right-click away in the Volume Mixer. On a Mac, the mute key is a blunt instrument: it kills the whole output or nothing.

What "push-to-mute" actually means (and the distinction that trips people up)

"Push-to-mute" gets used two different ways, and they're worth separating before you go looking for the wrong fix.

The first is a microphone behavior inside a conferencing app — the mirror image of push-to-talk. You hold a key and your mic is muted while held, so you can cough or type without the room hearing it. That lives inside Zoom, Teams, Discord and friends, and it only touches your mic. If that's what you're after, it's a setting in that specific app, not a system feature.

The second — and the one most people mean when they search for it on a Mac — is about what you hear: a single key that instantly silences one app's output no matter which window is focused. Cut the stream, cut the game, cut the music, while a call keeps playing at full volume. That's the gap macOS leaves open, and it's the one a per-app mixer fills.

Why macOS can't do it out of the box

Everything you play on a Mac funnels into a single master output. The volume keys, the menu-bar slider, and the mute key all act on that one level. There's no native concept of "this app's channel," so there's nothing for a per-app mute shortcut to attach to. Apple never shipped the Windows-style Volume Mixer, and as of macOS 15 that's still true.

The free fallback is each app's own mute: a browser tab's speaker icon, Spotify's controls, a video player's M key. That works for the handful of apps that have a mute button — but it's scattered across windows, it does nothing for apps that lack one (alerts, games, many Electron apps), and it means hunting for the control every time instead of hitting one key. The whole point of push-to-mute is speed, and window-hunting is the opposite of speed.

The fix: a global per-app mute hotkey

A per-app mixer sits at the system audio layer and gives every running app its own channel — the thing macOS is missing. Once an app has a channel, you can bind a global mute hotkey to it: a key combo that works from any window, with that app in the background, so one press cuts its sound and another brings it back.

In Fader you set this up once in the Console: map an app to a channel, then assign it a global shortcut like ⌘⇧M for "Spotify · toggle mute." Fader also lets you bind a single key to "focused app · toggle mute," so whatever you're looking at gets silenced by the same keystroke. Press, it's gone; press again, it's back — from inside any other app.

One thing to be straight about: Fader's per-app mute is a toggle, not a momentary hold. You tap to mute and tap again to restore — you don't hold the key down the whole time the app is silent. That's by design. True hold-to-mute (silent only while the key is pressed) is really a microphone pattern; for an app's output you'd never want to keep a finger on a key for a ten-minute stretch. A toggle is the faster, more practical version of push-to-mute for things you hear.

How the options compare

Several tools can mute a single app. They differ mostly in how you reach the mute — and whether you can trigger it from the keyboard without opening a panel first.

To be fair to the others: Background Music is genuinely good and free — it's open source and gives every app a slider and a mute in the menu bar. SoundSource is the deepest of the bunch, with per-app EQ and audio-unit plugins, and if you want that processing it's worth the price; note version 6 requires macOS 15 or later. Both center their controls in a menu-bar panel you open, click, and dismiss. Fader's bet is narrower: the fastest place to put a mute is a key you already have under your fingers, so push-to-mute is one global keystroke instead of a trip to the menu bar.

Setting it up in Fader, step by step

Once Fader is installed and has audio access, a per-app push-to-mute takes about a minute:

1. Open the Console and add a channel for the app you want to silence — say the browser or a game. 2. Go to Global Shortcuts and add a new shortcut. 3. Pick that channel and the "toggle mute" action, then record a key combo you'll remember, like ⌘⇧M. 4. Optionally, bind a single key to "focused app · toggle mute" so the app you're currently looking at is always one keystroke from silence.

From then on the shortcut works everywhere — you don't have to switch to the app, and you don't have to open Fader. If you also want to ride levels rather than just mute, the same keyboard turns into a full mixer; see how to set a keyboard shortcut to mute an app on Mac for the broader setup.

Bottom line

macOS gives you one mute key for the entire system and nothing finer, so there's no native push-to-mute for a single app. The real fix is a per-app mixer that exposes each app as its own channel and lets you bind a global mute hotkey to it. For a one-off, an app's own mute button is free and fine. For the thing you reach for ten times a day — one key, any app, from any window — a keyboard-first mixer is what turns "I should mute that" into a reflex. That reflex is exactly what Fader is built for.