How to send game audio to headphones and voice chat to the speakers on a Mac

Here's the situation: on a Mac, your game and your voice chat both feed the same audio destination, and macOS hands you only one at a time — so nothing built in lets you push the game into your headphones while chat stays out loud on the speakers. The two apps have to be aimed apart. Half of that is often free, since Discord carries its own output picker and sending incoming voices to the speakers is a single dropdown. The stubborn half is the game, which on most Macs simply tracks whichever destination the system is set to. From there it's either a hand-built BlackHole rig or a per-app router that pins each side once.

It's a specific but real setup. Maybe you want the game filling your headphones for immersion while your squad's voices play out loud so the room can hear the call, or so your ears aren't fully sealed off. Maybe it's the reverse and you're here to do the same trick in the other direction. Either way the mechanism is identical: two apps, two different output devices, at the same time. macOS treats all your audio as one stream to one device, which is exactly why the Sound menu can't do this on its own.

Why macOS won't split your game and your chat

On a Mac there is a single active output device. The Sound settings pane and the volume keys move that one device — pick your headphones and everything follows into the headphones; pick the speakers and it all comes back out loud. There's no column of per-app output menus like the one Windows exposes. Core Audio can address devices on a per-app basis, but Apple never shipped a user-facing control for it, so the split you want lives in third-party territory. This is the output-routing cousin of the volume problem in sending one app's audio to a different output on Mac.

The free half: your voice app probably has an output picker

Start with the part that likely costs nothing. Discord — the most common voice-chat app for gaming — has a built-in output device selector. Open Settings → Voice & Video and choose your speakers from the Output Device dropdown. From then on, incoming voice plays through the speakers regardless of what your system output is set to. TeamSpeak and a few other dedicated voice apps expose the same kind of setting.

That single dropdown solves the voice-to-speakers half outright, for free, without touching a virtual device. If your voice chat runs in a browser (Discord's web client, or an in-browser party chat) it's the opposite story — browsers have no per-tab output picker and follow the system default — but the desktop Discord app is the common case, and it does have the control.

The hard half: most Mac games follow the system output

The game is where it gets awkward. A handful of games — usually bigger titles with detailed audio settings — let you pick an output device inside the game. If yours does, point it at your headphones and you're done: no extra software, no virtual devices. Check the game's audio options first, because that's the cleanest possible fix.

Most Mac games, though — especially anything through Steam, most indies, and anything built on a common engine without an audio-device menu — have no output setting at all. They send their sound to whatever the system default output happens to be. So if you set the system default to your speakers to satisfy Discord, the game lands on the speakers too; set it to headphones for the game, and the system-level move drags everything with it. That's the wall people hit, and it's why this needs per-app routing rather than a single system setting.

The free DIY route: BlackHole and Audio MIDI Setup

When the game has no output picker, the no-cost path is BlackHole, a free, open-source virtual audio device, together with macOS's built-in Audio MIDI Setup. The idea is to build an aggregate or multi-output device and steer audio through it so a given app lands on the device you want. Audio hobbyists lean on this, and for many jobs it genuinely works.

The honest catch: BlackHole is designed to pass audio between apps and to duplicate a stream across outputs, not to hand you a tidy "this app to headphones, that app to speakers" switch. For a game that has no output setting of its own, there's often no clean way to peel just that one app onto a separate device through BlackHole alone — the app still needs some way to target the virtual device, which it doesn't have. You can end up maintaining a chain of aggregate devices and still not get an exact per-app split. Great if you enjoy the tinkering; a lot of moving parts if you just want to play.

One more thing worth knowing before you install anything: Background Music, the popular free open-source tool, controls per-app volume, not per-app output. As of 2026 it keeps every app on the same system output device, so it can't send your game one way and voice chat the other. It's a fine app for the wrong job here.

The set-it-once path: a per-app routing app

A routing app does at the OS level what the game refuses to do itself: it assigns each app its own output device, independent of the system default. You set the default output once, then add a rule per app — the game to your headphones, voice chat to your speakers — and each app goes where you told it, staying put across restarts and reconnects.

SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba is the deep option. It sends individual apps to different outputs, layers on effects and EQ, and version 6 (shipped late 2025) added grouped output devices, integrated AirPlay streaming, and Quick Configs. It's a one-time $49. Fader does the same per-app output routing in a clean list — set a device per app and it sticks — for a one-time $19.99, and it also rides per-app volume from your keyboard in the same app, which matters when the game is drowning out the call and you want to drop it a notch mid-match. Both are honest fits; the split below is where they earn their keep, since neither the game nor a virtual device gives it to you for free.

The exact setup: game to headphones, voice chat to speakers

With a per-app routing app the recipe is three steps:

1. Set the default system output to whichever device most apps should use — say, your speakers. 2. Add a route for the game: pick it and choose your headphones as its output. 3. Leave voice chat on the default (speakers), or add an explicit route for it too so it's locked. That's it — the game plays into your headphones, chat comes out of the speakers, and everything else inherits the default.

In Fader that's the Routing tab: the default output sits at the top and each app route is a row — App → Device — from a dropdown. Because the same app also gives every running app a fader on your keyboard, you can nudge the game's level with letter keys the moment it overpowers the voices, without alt-tabbing or hunting through the Sound menu. If you want the broader picture of the headphones-versus- speakers split for any pair of apps, the companion guide on sending one app to headphones while the rest plays on speakers covers the general case.

Bottom line

macOS points every app at one output, so a game-in-headphones, chat-on-speakers split isn't something the Sound menu can do. Get the free wins first: Discord's Output Device setting sends voice to your speakers on its own, and if your game happens to expose an output picker, aim it at your headphones and you're finished. When the game has no such setting — the common case — BlackHole plus Audio MIDI Setup is capable but fiddly for this exact goal, and Background Music won't route output at all. To set both sides as rules once and stop thinking about it, a per-app routing app is the straight path: SoundSource is the deep $49 option, and Fader does the routing plus keyboard-fast per-app volume for $19.99 one-time.