How to Adjust Zoom Volume Only

Anyone who's spent a year on Zoom calls has hit this problem. Your colleague is too quiet, you turn the system volume up, your teammate gets disconnected, the "join sound" chimes, and now your phone is ringing in the next room because the volume that fixed Zoom also blasted every other app on the system at maximum. Zoom routes audio through your system's default output, which means it shares a volume slider with everything else. There are several workarounds, depending on your OS.

Windows: The Volume Mixer

Right-click the speaker icon in the system tray (bottom-right corner) and choose "Open Volume Mixer." This opens a per-app volume slider list. Zoom shows up as a discrete row, separate from system sounds, browsers, and other apps. Move the Zoom slider to set its volume independently.

The Volume Mixer remembers per-app settings across launches, which means once you've set Zoom's volume relative to your system, that ratio sticks. Turning the system volume up or down still affects Zoom, but the relative ratio between Zoom and other apps stays where you set it.

On Windows 11, the same controls live under Settings > System > Sound > Volume mixer, which is the same feature with a redesigned UI.

macOS: The Indirect Approach

macOS doesn't have a native per-app volume control. The system audio is one slider for all apps, and there's no built-in equivalent of the Windows Volume Mixer. The two workarounds:

First, use Zoom's own volume slider. In the Zoom audio settings (Preferences > Audio), there's a speaker volume slider that controls only Zoom's audio output. Set this to the level you want for Zoom specifically, then adjust the system volume up or down to balance Zoom against everything else. This is the lightest-touch approach and covers most people's needs.

Second, install BackgroundMusic (free, open source) or SoundSource ($39, paid). Both add per-app volume sliders to macOS that work the way Windows Volume Mixer does. SoundSource is the more polished one if you're willing to pay; BackgroundMusic is competent and free.

Linux: PulseAudio Volume Control

Most Linux desktop environments come with PulseAudio, and the GUI tool pavucontrol gives you per-app volume sliders out of the box. Install it via your package manager (sudo apt install pavucontrol on Debian / Ubuntu) and run it. The Playback tab shows every app currently producing audio, with independent sliders for each.

The Headphones Workaround

If you mostly take Zoom calls on a headset and listen to music on speakers, both Windows and macOS support setting different default outputs per app. Plug in your headset, set Zoom's audio output (in Zoom's preferences) to the headset, leave system audio routed to the speakers. Zoom plays through one set of speakers, music plays through the other, and the volume sliders are effectively independent because they're controlling different physical outputs.

This is the cleanest solution if you have the hardware for it. Most wireless headsets and most USB headsets show up as separate audio output devices in the OS, so the routing-per-app pattern is straightforward.

The Bigger Pattern

The fact that this is a question worth a thousand words says something about how desktop OS audio architecture has aged. Per-app volume control is a basic feature that Windows has had since Vista and macOS still doesn't have natively in 2020. Apple's reasoning (probably) is that the unified system slider is simpler. The reality, in a year where everyone's spending six hours a day on Zoom, is that the unified slider is the wrong default for the way people actually use computers now. Whether macOS adds a native fix in a future release is the open question.