Mac Audio for Meditation and Focus: One App Only

You start a meditation session or an ambient sound app on your Mac: rain sounds, a guided session, white noise. You settle in. Then Slack pings, Mail chimes, and a forgotten browser tab starts playing a video. The calm is gone, because every app shares one volume and macOS has no built-in way to say 'only this app makes sound'.

What macOS can do

Turn on a Focus

A Focus (such as Do Not Disturb), from Control Center or System Settings > Focus, silences notification alerts from most apps. That handles a lot of the pings.

What it doesn't do: stop apps from playing audio. A browser tab that auto-plays, a video you left paused, or an app that plays its own sounds outside of notifications can still be heard.

Lower alert sounds

In System Settings > Sound you can set the alert volume lower, which affects system alert sounds without touching your meditation audio.

Quit or pause the rest

Close tabs that might play audio, pause Music and quit chat apps for the session. Simple and free, but you have to reopen everything afterwards.

The mute key isn't the answer

Muting your Mac silences everything, including the app you wanted to hear. There's no native 'mute everything except this one app'.

Mute everything except your calm app

SoundDial, a per-app volume mixer for Mac puts a slider and a mute button for every running app in your menu bar.

For a session:

• Your meditation or ambient app (or the browser, if your sounds play in a tab): at a comfortable level
• Everything else: muted with one click each

Because each app has its own slider, you can also set a gentle level for the ambient app and leave your Mac's main volume where it is. If a guided session is recorded too quietly, you can boost that app above 100%, up to 200%.

When the session ends, unmute the apps you want to hear again from the menu bar. To make the switch quicker, save both mixes as profiles (say, "Meditate" and your everyday levels) and click a profile chip to apply it to the apps that are running.

More on the idea: mute everything except one app on Mac and how muting one app works.

Study and deep work

The same approach works for focused work. Keep lo-fi music or white noise at a level you like, mute Slack and Mail, and let the background sound fill your headphones without interruptions. Turn a Focus on as well to stop notification banners.

Good to know

• SoundDial works per app, not per browser tab: all tabs of a browser share one slider. If your ambient sound plays in a tab, keep other audio tabs closed.
• It does not record anything.
• It needs macOS 14.2 or later and costs €14.99 one-time purchase on the Mac App Store, no subscription.

Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store.