I have a question for those of you who use the Loopback app on macOS.
Here’s the situation: during a FaceTime Audio call, I’d like my conversation partner to hear both my voice and my screen reader. However, my voice is very quiet despite proper volume settings, and the screen reader is barely audible — only a few words can be heard every now and then.
Additionally, when I tested the same setup in Zoom, it didn’t work when I tried to add both my voice and the screen reader to a single pair of channels. But when I assigned each audio source to its own separate pair of channels, everything worked fine. In my opinion, it shouldn’t behave this way.
Has anyone else experienced something similar?
By Ines, 7 November, 2025
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
Enable Mute When Capturing if you can
Sounds ducking themselves while on a Facetime call is a purposeful feature by Apple, with no way to disable it. A workaround, though, is to enable "mute when capturing" on the sources you want to clearly be heard while on call. This has the side effect of you not being able to hear what you're looping back, unless you add a monitor to your Loopback device.
Ok, thanks for the reply.
I just want to make sure I understand you correctly — I should enable the “mute when capturing” option and add a monitor to the audio I want to hear, and then my conversation partner will clearly hear VoiceOver and everything else I add to the call, right?
If that’s the case, of course I can do that. The delay won’t bother me that much, as long as the other person can hear what they’re supposed to hear.
I know Apple added this intentional audio ducking, and honestly, it’s a great feature — but when you’re training people on the Mac, it’s not really desirable. Sure, there are other ways to work around it, but this one seems the most convenient. You set it up once, connect, and it just works.
Exactly!
That's exactly it! You turn mute when capturing on for the devices you want the other person to hear, then add a monitor to the loopback device and hear things from there.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help.
Thank you so much for trying to help, but it’s still just as bad. During a FaceTime call, my audio keeps cutting out, and the same happens with the screen reader. I’ve made sure the sample rates are set the same everywhere, and I also turned off voice isolation, but the issue remains. I’m not sure if the macOS 26 update might have messed something up — it used to work before, at least as far as I remember.
I’ve figured it all out now.
So it turns out that I shouldn’t select the audio device in the system settings — even though FaceTime is set to use the default system microphone — because that causes some interference. However, when I choose the correct microphone directly from the audio and video settings in the menu bar during an active FaceTime call, everything works perfectly. And I don’t even need to have the “mute when capturing” option enabled.
Such a simple thing, but honestly, it didn’t occur to me before. That’s why I decided to share it here — maybe it’ll help someone else who runs into the same issue.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help, and best regards!