How to find which app is making noise on your Mac

Picture it: you're concentrating, headphones in, and a faint ad jingle starts playing. You have Chrome with 30 tabs, Safari with another 15, Slack running, two Discord channels, a Spotify window you forgot about, and Music in the background. Which one is it?

Three ways to find the culprit, ranked by how much they actually work in 2026.

Method 1: Activity Monitor (built-in)

Open Activity Monitor → Energy and look at the Audio Playing column. Apps actively producing audio are flagged.

Catches: Spotify, Music, the parent process of a browser.

Misses: which tab in the browser. If it says "Google Chrome — playing audio," you still have to hunt.

Method 2: Browser tab indicators

Chrome, Safari, Edge, Arc, and Firefox all show a small speaker icon on the tab making noise. Click the speaker icon (or right-click the tab) to mute it without closing it.

• Chrome / Edge: speaker icon on the tab. Right-click → Mute site.
• Safari: speaker icon in the address bar; click to mute that tab.
• Arc: the tab in the sidebar shows a small audio indicator next to it.
• Firefox: speaker icon on the tab; click to toggle.

Catches: the offending tab, if it's in the foreground browser window.

Misses: background browser windows, picture-in-picture popups, and tabs in browsers you forgot you had open. Also doesn't help if the sound is coming from Slack or another non-browser app.

Method 3: Mystery Sound Finder

This is what we built into mactooloud. Tap the hotkey (default ⌘⇧F) and a panel surfaces every audio-producing process plus the specific tab inside Chrome / Safari / Edge / Arc. From the panel you can mute, lower, or quit the source in one click without leaving your current window.

Because it ties into the audio API directly, it picks up things macOS's own indicators miss — like a process that just started playing in the last half-second, or a tab that's audible but doesn't have a tab indicator yet because the audio just kicked in.

Bonus: prevent mystery sounds in the first place

If you find yourself running this hunt more than once a day, consider muting the apps you rarely want sound from by default. mactooloud's profiles let you save a "deep work" preset that silences Slack, Discord, Mail, and 90% of websites — leaving only the apps you actually want to hear from.