"When I join a call, drop everything else."

Music playing, three Slack channels chiming, and then a Zoom call starts — and you're scrambling for the volume key before anyone hears your Spotify queue. This is what "ducking" solves: dropping everything except the call the instant one starts, automatically, without you touching a fader.

Option 1: Auto-Ducking, by observation

MixPill's Auto-Ducking doesn't keep a list of "known" conferencing apps to watch for. Zoom, FaceTime, Teams, Discord, a browser tab running Google Meet — MixPill doesn't need to recognize any of them by name. It watches for any process that takes hold of the microphone, and the moment one does, every other channel drops to 20% volume. Let go of the mic — end the call, mute yourself and quit, whatever — and they climb back on their own.

The advantage of watching the microphone instead of matching an app list is that it works for anything, including tools that don't exist yet. A new conferencing app, a browser-based call, a voice memo recorder — if it takes the mic, MixPill reacts. The trade-off: anything that grabs the microphone triggers it, including, say, a voice-to-text tool you're using for something other than a call. In practice this is rare and short-lived.

This is a Pro feature — see pricing for specifics.

Option 2: Shortcuts and Focus filters

If you'd rather trigger ducking from something other than "the mic turned on" — say, a calendar event, a specific app launching, or a Focus mode you turn on by hand — macOS's own Shortcuts app and Focus filters can drive MixPill directly. MixPill exposes App Intents for setting a volume, muting an app, applying a preset, or toggling ducking, so an automation like "when I join a Focus called Meetings, apply my Ducking preset" runs as a system-level Shortcut rather than something you do by hand.

This route takes a few minutes of one-time setup in Shortcuts, but it means the trigger is exactly the one you choose — a calendar event, a time of day, a Focus mode — rather than microphone activity.

Which one to use

If you want it to just work without configuration, Auto-Ducking's microphone-based approach needs nothing set up beyond turning it on. If you want ducking tied to something more specific — a particular Focus mode, a calendar event, only certain apps — build a Shortcut around MixPill's App Intents instead. The two aren't mutually exclusive; nothing stops you from using Auto-Ducking as the default and a Shortcut for edge cases.