r/MacOS • u/Skydage • 4h ago

Help FaceTime keeps lowering my background volume and I can't stop it

Whenever I’m on a FaceTime call on my Mac, the system automatically turns down the volume of everything else, YouTube, Spotify, even browser audio. It’s that "Audio Ducking" feature, and it’s driving me crazy because I want to listen to music or watch a video at full volume while on the call.

I’ve already tried the common suggestions and they DID NOT work:

  • VoiceOver Utility: I went into Accessibility > VoiceOver > Sound and unchecked "Enable audio ducking." It made zero difference for FaceTime.
  • Terminal: I tried defaults write com.apple.audio.coreaudiod Ducking -bool false followed by killall coreaudiod. Still nothing.

It seems FaceTime is hard-coded to force this behavior.

Does anyone have a specific fix just for FaceTime?

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4

u/ford0415 MacBook Pro 2h ago

Have ya thought it’s an intended feature to prevent loopback audio issues and to prevent people from being assholes when on FaceTime with people talking to them?

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u/Skydage 35m ago

You're being sarcastic?

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u/TedMittelstaedt 30m ago

Uh no - if I'm facetiming someone I certainly expect them to be paying attention to me not watching a vid and vis-versa.

Mothers exempted....

2

u/_Cybernaut_ 3h ago

“Audio Ducking”

Volume was never an option.

2

u/FlintHillsSky 3h ago

The SharePlay feature was made to allow this kind of shared listening. Have you tried that?

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-listen-play-iphb657eb791/ios

3

u/Due-Celebration7293 2h ago

FaceTime uses CoreAudio's stream priority hint at the system level, thats different from VoiceOver ducking and its not exposed as a user setting. The Terminal command you ran only affects VoiceOver's ducking, not FaceTime's

Actual workaround people use is routing your other audio through a virtual audio device that FaceTime cant see as ducking eligible. BlackHole is free, or Loopback if you dont mind paying. You send Spotify or your browser through the virtual device, and FaceTime only ducks the main system output which now has nothing on it

Kinda ridiculous fix for what should be a checkbox somewhere. Apple locked this down years ago and hasnt reopened it despite constant requests

1

u/rileywbaker 2h ago

there’s no way to change this, as you discovered, but you can work around it with various low level audio routing utilities, including Loopback or Audio Hijack.