A Quick look at Sound Preferences

Introduction: Let’s take a look at our sound preferences for the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac. To view your sound preferences, which includes your speakers and microphone, what we do is we go to our System Preferences. The way that I’m going to access this is by clicking and holding, and then we can see all of our different preference panes. Now, what I do is I go to Sound. Select it. Then, we’re in our sound preference pane. What options do we have here? Well, we can set our sound effects output and input. Output being your speakers, input being your microphone. Sound effects are your alert sound. If you want to change the alert sound, all you have to do is select a different alert sound.

Where do you want your sound effects to play through? If you have multiple speakers, you can have your sound alerts played through one speaker while everything else plays through another speaker. You can also set your alert volume. Then, you can set if you want to hear user interface sound effects, and if you want to play feedback when the volume is changed. When you turn this on, when you change your volume, you’re going to hear a little feedback, indicating how loud your sound is. Then, we have our output volume. This is the overall volume of our Mac. The last option here is Show volume in the menu bar.

Remember how we have menu extras, I have this checked, so when I go up to my menu extras here on the right side, I have a speaker. When I click on it, I can go and set the volume as well as what the output device is. Let’s take a look at output. Click on it. From here, I can set which speakers I want to have as my output. This will change depending on which speakers you have. Below that, we have our balance. Then, again, we have our output volume. This is going to show at the bottom of each tab; this does not change. With our Input, we have our microphone. Select it. Then, from here, we can select which microphone we’re using. I have mine set for my USB microphone.

Below that, we have our Input volume, and you can see the levels as I’m speaking. If it’s too loud, I would slide this over to the left. If it’s not loud enough, I would slide it over to the right. Once again, we have our output volume. Again, this does not change within the different tabs. The last thing I want to show you is with our menu extra. When I go up to my speaker here, I can set the volume as well as my output device. I can also easily access my sound preferences by going to sound preferences. When I select this, it’s going to open up my preferences here.

Also, what I can to do is I can select which microphone I want to use using the menu extra. To do that, what we do is we hold down the Option key before I click. I’m going to hold down the Option key. Then, when I click, you’re going to see I have Input Device. So, I do have more options. I have to hold down the Option key to see all of the options.

Those are our sound preferences, which are located in the System Preferences on the Mac.