How to Boost App Volume Above 100% on Mac (Volume Overdrive Explained)

macOS caps every app's volume at 100% of the system output level — there's no native way to push a single app louder than that ceiling. If your system volume is already maxed and a particular app still sounds too quiet, the only built-in options are to get closer to your speakers or buy louder ones. A handful of third-party tools, however, can overdrive individual app audio — boosting it past 100% in software — without touching anything else.

Why does macOS have a volume ceiling in the first place?

Apple's audio stack is designed around a single master output level. Every app shares that ceiling; no app gets to request more headroom than the system allows. This is a deliberate choice — it prevents distortion and protects audio hardware — but it creates a real problem when one source is just mixed quietly. Think of a YouTube video with low production audio, a video call where the far end sounds distant, or a game that ships with conservative default levels. On Windows, the per-app volume mixer lets you push individual apps to 200% or more (with obvious distortion risk). macOS has no equivalent.

The workaround is digital gain amplification applied to an app's audio stream before it reaches the output device. Software intercepts the stream, multiplies the signal, and passes the louder result downstream. Done carefully — staying under roughly 150–160% — this adds meaningful volume with little audible distortion. Push it higher and you'll hear clipping.

Which apps can you actually overdrive on Mac?

Not every audio tool lets you go past 100%. Here's what the main options look like:

System Settings → Sound: One system-wide slider, hard-capped at 100%. No per-app control at all.

Soundish (soundish app): Per-app volume slider that goes from 0% to 200%. You can push a specific app — say, a video call in FaceTime or a browser tab playing a quiet podcast — to 150% while leaving Spotify sitting at 80%. The overdrive is applied per audio stream, so other apps are completely unaffected. Requires macOS 14.2+ because it uses Apple's Core Audio Tap API, which is the legitimate, sandboxed way to intercept and modify app audio on modern macOS.

SoundSource (by Rogue Amoeba, $49): Also supports per-app overdrive past 100%, plus a 10-band EQ and Audio Unit plugin support per app. The most capable option, but the price reflects it.

eqMac Pro (~$40): Offers system-wide EQ and some per-app routing, but per-app overdrive is less straightforward than in the dedicated volume mixer tools.

Boom 3D (~$20–30): Adds system-wide volume boost and EQ, but it applies globally — you can't boost one app while leaving others untouched.

If you need to overdrive one or two specific apps and don't need EQ or Audio Unit plugins, Soundish is the most direct solution at considerably less than SoundSource. If you want the full professional audio production toolkit, SoundSource is worth the extra cost.

How to set up per-app volume overdrive in Soundish

Setup takes about two minutes:

1. Download Soundish from appish.app/soundish and open it. On first launch, it installs a small audio driver — this is the component that enables stream-level access. macOS will prompt you to allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security.
2. Once running, Soundish lives in your menu bar. Click it to see every app currently producing audio.
3. Find the app you want to boost — FaceTime, Chrome, a specific game, whatever. Drag its volume slider right past the 100% mark. The slider goes to 200%.
4. Adjust to taste. For most quiet content, somewhere between 120% and 160% adds noticeable volume without audible distortion. Past ~170% on music or voice, clipping becomes obvious.

Soundish remembers your per-app settings across restarts, so you don't need to reconfigure every session. If your quiet app is Chrome or a Chromium-based browser (Brave, Edge), Soundish handles those correctly — Chromium-based browsers emit audio from helper processes that don't identify as the parent app, which is a fiddlier problem than it sounds. That multi-process attribution is one of the harder engineering problems in per-app Mac audio.

Does software overdrive damage your speakers or hearing?

Software overdrive amplifies the digital signal. Whether that causes distortion depends on where the signal sits relative to the hardware's limits:

• Speakers: At moderate overdrive (up to ~150%), you're unlikely to damage decent speakers. At 200% on already-loud content, you can push hardware into distortion — back off if it sounds harsh.
• Headphones: Overdrive through headphones primarily risks your hearing, not the headphones themselves. Use it to compensate for quiet sources, not to blast already-loud audio.
• Built-in Mac speakers: The amplifier in a MacBook limits actual output regardless of software headroom. You'll get some gain, but the hardware ceiling is still there. External speakers or headphones respond more noticeably to overdrive.

The safe mental model: use overdrive to bring a quiet app up to the level of your other audio, not to push everything louder than it was.

What about boosting volume for Zoom or Teams calls specifically?

Video call audio is one of the most common reasons people go looking for overdrive. The far end of a call sounds quiet because the caller's microphone was too far away, their gain was set low, or their connection introduced compression artifacts. You can't control their setup.

In Soundish, find the Zoom (or Teams, or Google Meet, or FaceTime) process in the menu bar — it appears as soon as the call has active audio — and pull the slider to 130–150%. The boost applies only to that call's output; your music, system sounds, and anything else stay exactly where they were.

Note: Soundish currently doesn't offer per-app keyboard shortcuts for instant volume changes. If you need a hotkey to bump a specific app by 10% in real time, SoundSource has that. It's on the Soundish roadmap, but not there yet — worth knowing before you buy if that's a hard requirement.

Common questions

Can I boost volume above 100% on Mac without any extra software?

No — macOS provides no native mechanism to exceed the system volume ceiling for individual apps. The only built-in audio controls are the system-wide volume slider (System Settings → Sound) and, on some audio interfaces, hardware gain knobs. Third-party apps that access Core Audio at the stream level are the only software route.

Will volume overdrive work on macOS Ventura or earlier?

Soundish requires macOS 14.2 (Sonoma) or later because it uses Apple's Core Audio Tap API, which was introduced in Sonoma. On Ventura or earlier, SoundSource uses a different driver approach (HAL audio plug-ins) that works on older OS versions — but SoundSource installs a system audio driver that affects all apps, not just the one you're targeting.

Does overdrive affect recording or just playback?

In Soundish, overdrive is applied to the playback stream only — what comes out of your speakers or headphones. It does not affect what an app records or what goes over a call connection. Boosting Zoom's playback volume makes the far end sound louder to you; it doesn't change what you sound like to them.