You're in an online music lesson — teaching or learning. Your student plays through Zoom and you need to hear them clearly. GarageBand or Logic has a backing track playing. A metronome app is ticking. Maybe Spotify has a reference recording queued. All of these are fighting for one system volume slider. Raise the volume to hear your student, and the metronome becomes deafening. Lower the metronome manually, and now the backing track is too quiet to play along with.
The online music lesson challenge
Music lessons require precise audio balancing that no other use case demands. You need to hear the remote participant with enough fidelity to catch technique and timing issues. You need a metronome or click track audible but not dominant. Backing tracks need to sit under the performance, not over it. And if you're the teacher, you might need to play reference recordings for the student — switching between apps while maintaining the right relative volumes.
Each of these sources has its own internal volume level, and none of them coordinate with each other. macOS has no tools to balance them.
Building a lesson audio mix
SoundDial lets you set each app to its ideal level, creating a balanced mix for the lesson without touching internal app settings.
Teaching profile
- Zoom / FaceTime: 100% — student audio is the priority
- Metronome app: 35% — audible click without overwhelming
- GarageBand / Logic: 50% — backing tracks under the performance
- Spotify: muted (unmute briefly for reference plays)
- Slack / Mail: muted — zero interruptions during the lesson
Practice profile
- Metronome: 50% — clear timing reference
- DAW: 80% — backing tracks at full practice level
- Spotify: 70% — reference recordings accessible
- Everything else: muted — focused practice
Switch from teaching to personal practice with one click. Your audio environment matches the activity without manually adjusting four or five apps each time.
Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store — €14.99 one-time purchase, no subscription, macOS 14.2+.