The fastest, reliable fix is SoundDial, a Mac App Store menu-bar mixer that gives every app its own volume slider and a real boost that pushes past 100%. Open your browser or podcast player, drag its slider above max, and a quiet video or lecture instantly gets louder — no drivers, no restart.
Why some videos and podcasts are just too quiet
You crank your Mac to 100%, and the interview is still a whisper. This isn't your imagination. Audio is mastered at wildly different loudness levels — a webinar recorded on a laptop mic, a quiet indie podcast, or an old lecture upload can sit 15–20 dB below a professionally produced YouTube video. Your system volume is already maxed, so there's no headroom left to give.
Here's the catch: macOS has no built-in per-app volume mixer. Windows has had one for years (the Volume Mixer in the system tray), but on a Mac, the volume keys move one global level for everything. There's no native way to say "make only this browser tab louder" — let alone push a single app past 100%.
The real fix: per-app volume boost
To make a quiet source louder than your speakers normally allow, you need software that applies gain to that app specifically and can amplify beyond the 100% ceiling. That's exactly what a per-app mixer with a boost feature does.
With SoundDial, every running app shows up in a menu-bar list with its own slider. Slide a quiet app up to 150% or 200% and the audio is amplified in real time. Because the boost is per-app, everything else — your music, notifications, a call in another window — stays at a normal level. You're not blasting your whole system to hear one soft podcast.
Global volume asks "how loud is the Mac?" A per-app mixer asks "how loud is this app?" — which is the question that actually matters when one video is quiet and the rest are fine.
How to boost a quiet video or podcast, step by step
- Install SoundDial from the Mac App Store. It's sandboxed and Apple-reviewed, so it installs cleanly like any other app — no separate download, no audio driver, no permission gauntlet.
- Start playing the quiet video, podcast episode, or lecture in whatever app you use — Safari, Chrome, a podcast client, VLC.
- Click the SoundDial icon in your menu bar. You'll see a slider for each app currently making sound.
- Drag that app's slider above 100% — try 150% first, then push higher if it's still too soft. The change is instant.
- Leave everything else alone. Only the app you boosted gets louder; your system stays balanced.
If you find yourself boosting the same apps every day — say, a podcast player and your browser — you can save that setup as a volume profile and recall it in one click instead of re-adjusting each time.
A word of caution on boosting
Amplifying past 100% adds gain, and gain has limits. Push a very quiet, low-quality recording hard enough and you may hear clipping or distortion — that's the source running out of clean signal, not a flaw in the app. Boost until it's comfortably audible, then back off if it starts sounding harsh. On built-in laptop speakers, extreme boost can also strain the drivers, so go easier there than with good headphones or external speakers.
What about free or built-in options?
You have alternatives, and it's worth being honest about them:
- System volume + app-level sliders. Some players (VLC, a few browsers via extensions) let you boost their own audio. Fine if you only ever need it in one app — but you're stuck configuring each app separately, with no unified control and no profiles.
- eqMac is a free EQ and booster. It can raise system-wide loudness, but it's a global tool, not a clean per-app mixer, and it works at the whole-output level.
- Background Music is free and open source and does offer per-app volume. But it relies on an audio-capture setup that can break on newer versions of macOS, and it lacks a dedicated boost, profiles, and auto-ducking.
- FineTune is a free open-source menu-bar app — a lightweight option if you want the basics and don't mind community-maintained software.
- SoundSource by Rogue Amoeba (~$39) is the pro-grade heavyweight: per-app EQ, output routing, the works. It also requires a download and an audio-capture driver, and it costs more than double SoundDial. Overkill if all you want is to make quiet audio louder.
Why SoundDial is the practical choice
SoundDial sits in the sweet spot for this exact problem. It's €14.99 one-time — no subscription — and it lives on the Mac App Store, which means it's sandboxed, reviewed by Apple, and installs without any DMG or system extension to trust. You get the per-app boost you actually came for, plus profiles, per-app mute, quick output switching, and auto-ducking that dips other apps when you need to focus on one. It does the loud thing simply, and does the rest well.
Tired of straining to hear quiet videos and podcasts? Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store for €14.99 and give every app its own volume — with the boost to hear anything clearly.