Mac Audio for Video Editing: Premiere and DaVinci

You're editing in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. You scrub through the timeline to judge dialogue, and then Slack pings, a browser tab with reference footage starts playing, and Music is still going in the background. It's hard to judge your edit when other apps keep leaking into what you hear.

Why editing needs a quiet Mac

Judging dialogue and music in a timeline means listening carefully. If a chat notification plays at the same loudness as your dialogue, it throws off your sense of how loud things really are. If background music keeps playing, your ears adjust to it and you end up setting levels wrong.

macOS gives you one output volume for everything. The volume keys and the menu-bar slider move your editor, your browser and your chat apps together.

Start with the native options

1. Check your editor's audio output

Video editors usually have their own audio output setting in their preferences (look for an audio or playback section). Make sure it's set to the headphones or speakers you actually listen on, so you aren't judging audio through a different device than you think.

2. Turn on a Focus

A Focus (such as Do Not Disturb) in Control Center silences notification alerts from most apps while you work. It won't stop an app from playing audio it's already playing, such as a video in a browser tab, but it cuts most of the pings.

3. Pause or quit what you don't need

The classic editor workaround: pause Music, close tabs that play audio, quit chat apps. It works, but you lose the ability to keep a client chat open or check a reference clip without disturbing your listening.

4. Use each app's own volume

Many apps have their own volume control: the browser's video player, Music, Spotify. Turning those down helps, but you have to remember where each one is, and chat apps rarely offer a volume control for their sounds at all.

Keep everything open, control what you hear

SoundDial, a per-app volume mixer for Mac puts a volume slider and a mute button for every running app in your menu bar. You don't have to quit anything.

A typical editing session:

• Your editor: 100%, so timeline playback stays at your normal listening level
• Browser: muted, unmuted for a moment when you want to check a reference clip
• Slack, Messages, Mail: muted, so no sounds land on top of your dialogue
• Music or Spotify: muted while you work on audio

When you start a long render and want to be reachable again, move the chat app's slider back up. It takes a couple of clicks from the menu bar, or save your editing mix as a profile and click it to apply it to the apps that are running.

If a reference clip or a client's voice message is too quiet, you can boost that one app above 100%, up to 200%, without raising your editor or anything else. There's no limiter, so a big boost can clip on a loud source; raise it in small steps.

A few things to know:

• It works per app, not per browser tab: all tabs of a browser share one slider.
• 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.

More on the basics: per-app volume control on Mac, and if notifications are the main problem, how to mute one app on Mac.

Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store.