Route Zoom to AirPods while keeping Spotify on speakers

You like working with music on speakers. Calls feel more natural in AirPods. macOS makes this annoyingly hard. Here's the setup that works.

Why Multi-Output Device doesn't solve this

If you've Googled this before, you've found Audio MIDI Setup → Create Multi-Output Device. That sends the same audio to multiple devices simultaneously. It doesn't split which audio goes where. Spotify and Zoom both end up on both AirPods and speakers. Worse, output level becomes uncontrollable because Multi-Output devices don't expose a volume slider.

What you actually want is per-app device routing — each app explicitly assigned to its own output.

The macOS-only way (limited)

Open System Settings → Sound → Output. Then with Zoom running, open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Sound (or in some versions of macOS, the per-app audio settings inside the app's own preferences). You can set Zoom's output device individually.

Catches: the setting doesn't always stick across reboots, Zoom occasionally resets it after updates, and you have to repeat this dance for every app.

The mactooloud way

Open mactooloud's menu bar mixer. Each app row has a small device picker next to its slider. Set:

• Zoom → AirPods
• Meet → AirPods
• FaceTime → AirPods
• Spotify → Desk speakers
• Apple Music → Desk speakers
• Chrome → Desk speakers (or AirPods, depending on your call habits)

When AirPods disconnect (because they ran out of battery, you walked away, etc.), mactooloud falls back to your default output for those apps so calls don't suddenly play out of speakers in front of your whole open office.

Variations

Gaming setup

Discord voice to AirPods, game audio to speakers. mactooloud handles this identically: Discord → AirPods, Game → speakers. See our Gamers guide for the full setup.

Streaming setup

Game audio to OBS, music to speakers, voice chat to in-ears. Three outputs, three apps. Once configured, it survives software updates and device reconnects.

Why does macOS not just do this?

Per-app device assignment has been technically possible in macOS for years, but Apple has never exposed it as a first-class UI surface. The current per-process audio APIs added in Sonoma make it possible for third-party tools to do this cleanly without virtual drivers — which is why a new generation of audio utilities (including mactooloud) is finally usable.