How to set a different volume for each app on Windows
Short answer
Windows has no built-in slider to set volume per app on the desktop. You can do it through the hidden Volume Mixer (right-click the speaker icon, then Volume mixer), but it is buried and resets often. A tray app like AppRig keeps a live per-app mixer one click away, with sliders for every app currently playing sound.
The manual way
Right-click the speaker icon in the tray and choose “Volume mixer” (or go to Settings > System > Sound > Volume mixer). Every app currently playing sound gets its own slider, so you can turn down a game or a browser tab without touching the master volume.
It works, but it has real limits. The mixer only lists apps that are actively playing audio, so it disappears the moment they go quiet. It is also several clicks deep no matter which route you take, and levels have a habit of resetting when an app restarts, so you end up repeating the same adjustment over and over.
The faster way with AppRig
AppRig’s Mixer sub-tool keeps a live slider for every app plus the system master, right in the tray. Live level meters show at a glance which app is actually making noise, so you are not guessing which slider to reach for.
Scroll on a tile to nudge its volume up or down, click the speaker icon to mute an app instantly, and route individual apps to different output devices, for example Spotify to your speakers and Discord to a headset. Because it lives in the tray, the whole mixer is one click away instead of buried a few menus deep in Settings.
See the full AppRig how-to in the docs →
Related questions
AppRig does this and more, all in one local-first Windows app. See what AppRig does →