Microsoft Teams turns your music down on a Mac: how to stop it

By Hardeep Singh, maker of CallLane · Updated 21 October 2026

Microsoft Teams turns your music down by about 20 dB during calls on a Mac; CallLane stops it by playing Teams through its own output device, so the rest of your audio keeps its volume. When a Teams call or meeting turns on voice processing for your mic, macOS lowers every other sound until it ends. Teams has no setting to stop it, and neither does System Settings.

Tested on macOS 27.0.1 with CallLane 1.0.5, 21 October 2026.

Why Teams ducks your audio

Teams cancels echo with voice processing, the same way FaceTime and Zoom do. When a call or meeting starts, macOS ducks every other sound on the same output: your playlist, a video, a game. It’s the Mac doing it, so reinstalling Teams or changing its notification settings won’t change anything. How audio ducking works on a Mac.

What people try, and why it doesn’t work

• The Devices settings. Teams lets you pick the speaker and mic, and turn on noise suppression, voice isolation and high fidelity music mode (Microsoft’s list of device settings). Those change how your mic sounds to others. None of them sets the volume of other apps.
• Sharing with sound. The Include sound toggle sends what your Mac plays to the meeting (Microsoft’s audio settings guide). That changes what the others hear, not what you hear.
• The VoiceOver setting. The Audio ducking checkbox in VoiceOver Utility is for the screen reader, and calls ignore it. Here’s why.

The manual fix: give Teams a different speaker

macOS ducks the output device the call uses. If Teams plays on one device and your music on another, the music keeps its volume.

1. In Teams, select Settings and more, then Settings, then Devices.
2. Under Audio settings, pick a different output in the Speaker menu, for example the Mac’s built-in speakers while music plays on your headphones.

In a meeting, the arrow next to Mic opens the same choices (Microsoft’s audio settings guide). The catch: Teams now comes out of the speakers, and your mic picks it up.

The fix with CallLane

1. Install CallLane and run its setup. It adds an audio device called CallLane.
2. In Teams, select Settings and more, then Settings, then Devices, and pick CallLane in the Speaker menu. You do this once.
3. Join a call or meeting and play something. It stays at full volume, and Teams plays at the level you set in CallLane.

CallLane forwards the call to whatever headphones or speakers you’re using, so you hear Teams as usual. macOS ducks the CallLane device and nothing else. Other call apps keep the same setting here:

AirPods sound worse in Teams

When the Teams app uses your AirPods’ mic, they drop to headset mode, with low-quality mono sound for everything you hear. Teams keeps its own mic choice, so set it once: Settings, Devices, then pick your Mac’s mic in the Microphone menu. Microsoft’s help pages don’t describe a choice that follows the Mac’s default mic, so do this in Teams itself.

CallLane’s Lock input then keeps the Mac’s system input on its own mic and puts it back when AirPods reconnect, so FaceTime, dictation apps and anything else on the system mic stay off the AirPods mic too. Why AirPods sound bad on calls.

Questions