How to instantly silence everything except your current call on Mac

macOS has no "solo" button — nothing that mutes every app except your call in one move. The volume keys kill everything, the call included, and Do Not Disturb only silences notifications, not the music or video still playing underneath. The fix is a per-app mixer: you set up a profile once where the call app stays loud and everything else drops to zero, then recall it with a single keyboard shortcut whenever a call starts.

The scenario is always the same. A call lands, you hit answer, and your Mac is still a wall of other sound — Spotify from an hour ago, a muted-but-not-really YouTube tab, a game, a Slack huddle you forgot about. You want the opposite of a mixer right now: you want one app and silence everywhere else, instantly, before the other person starts talking. macOS gives you no clean way to do that. Here's what actually works.

Why the obvious options don't do it

The mute key on your keyboard is the first thing everyone tries. It's the wrong tool: it sets one master output to zero, so it silences your call along with everything else. There's no way to point it at "all apps except this one."

Do Not Disturb and Focus modes are the second guess, and they're a common misunderstanding. A Focus silences notification banners and alert sounds — the pings and chimes — but it does nothing to ordinary playback. Spotify keeps playing, a video keeps running, a game keeps blasting. Turning on a meeting Focus does not quiet the apps that are actually competing with your call. It was never built for that.

That leaves muting each app by hand: pause Spotify, mute the browser tab, quit the game's audio, find Discord. It works, but it's five or six scattered actions while someone is waiting for you to say hello — and half those apps hide their mute in a different place. By the time you've silenced everything, the first thirty seconds of the call are gone.

What you actually want: a solo for your call

The clean version of this is one action that says "mute everything except the app I'm on the call in." Think of it like a solo button on a mixing desk, except it solos a whole app's audio. macOS doesn't ship one, so the job falls to a per-app volume mixer — a small app that sits at the system audio layer and can set, or zero, each running app's level independently.

Once you have per-app control, there are two ways to get the one-keystroke solo:

• A saved profile. Build the arrangement once — call app at 100%, music, browser, game, and chat apps muted — save it as a "Call" profile, and bind it to a hotkey. One keypress drops you into that whole mix. A second profile ("Back to normal") restores everything when the call ends.
• Per-app mute keys. Assign a mute hotkey to each noisy app and tap the two or three you need to kill. Faster than hunting through windows, but you're still pressing several keys instead of one.

The profile approach is the real "solo": the whole room goes quiet around your call in a single stroke, and comes back just as fast.

The tools that can do it, compared

Every per-app mixer can set an app to zero. The difference that matters for this particular job is how fast you can trigger the whole "mute all but one" state — because the entire point is doing it in the two seconds before a call starts, without reaching for the mouse.

A note on honesty, because these are good apps. Background Music is free and open source and genuinely mutes per app, but its controls live in a menu-bar list — you click, you find the row, you drag. There's no global hotkey to flip a whole scene, so it's not built for the two-second solo. SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba is the deepest of the three, with per-app volume, routing, and EQ; version 6 added user-configurable keyboard shortcuts, so you can get close. It's $49 one-time and, as of version 6, requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later — worth knowing if you're on an older Mac. If you want EQ and the most control per app, it's the one to look at.

How to set it up in Fader

Fader's whole design is built around reaching the control without a mouse, which is exactly what this job needs. The setup is a one-time thing:

• Open your call app plus whatever else usually makes noise, so Fader can see them.
• Pull the call app to full and drop the rest to zero — from the keyboard, letter keys acting as faders.
• Save that as a profile (call it "Call" or "Meeting").
• Bind the profile to a global hotkey.

After that, a call lands and you hit the hotkey — everything but the call goes silent, instantly, from inside whatever app you were in. When it's over, your "normal" profile brings the music and the rest back. It's one keystroke in, one keystroke out, no account, and it works on macOS 14.4 and up. If you live in calls all day, that one shortcut is the difference between fumbling for silence and just having it.

If you want the broader version of this idea — a meeting scene, a focus scene, a streaming scene, each a keypress away — see one-keystroke audio scenes on Mac. And if your real goal is just killing distractions rather than protecting a call, there's a companion guide on silencing distracting apps with one keypress.

Bottom line

macOS has no way to mute everything except your call, and the usual suspects — the mute key, Do Not Disturb — either take out too much or the wrong thing. A per-app mixer is the only real fix, and the one that matters at the moment a call starts is a mixer you can trigger from the keyboard. Background Music can mute per app but has no scene hotkey; SoundSource can get close for $49 on macOS 15+. If you want a true one-keystroke solo for your call — silence in, silence out, nothing touched — that's what Fader is built to do.