How to tell what’s playing audio on your Mac
My friend and editor Joe and I were trying to talk.1 But something on his end continued to produce sound, and he couldn’t tell what it was. After some exploration, he realized that we had started using Slack’s “huddle” feature for a one-to-one audio chat and switched to FaceTime. He hadn’t hung up in Slack, and it was playing goshdarned hold music.
He said, “Shouldn’t there be a way to figure out which app is producing sound?” I said, yes—and then couldn’t immediately determine how. The two of us have approximately 7,500 years of Mac experience between us, so I hope you’ll never feel bad if you can’t solve a problem right away, either.
There are a few ways you can track down unwanted sound.
Browser muting
We all remember how we’d leave a tab or window open in Safari and then some time later, the Web site would reload the page or use other trickery and start playing an ad. We’d have to search through every open page to find the jerky one. Let’s be honest: some of us have hundreds, even thousands, of open tabs. This was a big job.
Apple added some visual indicators and menus to help you sort through. It evolved over the years, but the last several versions of Safari show an audio icon on any tab with audio playing, as well as in the Smart Search field (the old “URL bar”).
You can take several contextual actions:
- Tab: Click the audio icon on a tab, whether it’s the active one or not, and it mutes that tab’s audio.
- Smart Search field, current tab playing audio: Click the audio icon on the field, and the current tab’s audio is muted.
- Smart Search field, no audio in current tab: You can mute all tabs in all windows, not just the tabs in the current window, by clicking the audio icon on the field.
- Smart Search field, Control-click/right-click: Control-clicking/right-clicking the audio icon on the field lets you choose Mute This Tab (if it has active audio) or Mute Other Tab(s), which mutes every tab in every window that’s playing audio, except the current one—it could be playing audio or not.
You can also select Window > Mute/Unmute This Tab or Window > Mute/Unmute Other Tab(s).
Chrome and Firefox (and Chromium browsers, among others) all offer tab muting and discovery, too, using an audio icon on a tab and Control-click/right-click menus for mute and unmuting.
The sound of one hand apping
Apple doesn’t offer a system-wide “what’s playing that sound” tool. (Now Playing, via System Settings > Menu Bar in Tahoe, seemingly only reveals apps using some macOS audio framework, like Music and Safari.) I found two solutions, neither of which is cheap, but if it’s a recurring problem or you want app-specific, sophisticated sound control, you might enjoy adding one of them to your Mac’s soundscape-control repertoire.
- SoundSource ($45): Like many of Rogue Amoeba’s products, SoundSource captures many different desirable audio-related features into one place that Apple hasn’t provided much or any access to within macOS. Among those is that any app playing audio appears in a list.
- eqMac ($3 per month, $30 per year, $40 lifetime): An app with an interface that more closely resembles physical audio soundboards, eqMac also reveals which apps are squawking, showing them automatically on the leftmost edge of a scrolling list of active apps.
I’d have to make a deep study of the two apps to tell you whether one is superior to the other among the many features they offer, including headphone equalization, app-specific audio volume and effects, and many others. Fortunately, both offer trial versions, so you can test them out to see which fits your needs and your interface interaction style better.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- Joe Kissell runs Take Control Books, purveyors of fine how-to ebooks, of which I write a passel. ↩
[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]
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