How To Mute Zoom Without Muting Computer's Microphone?

We sometimes attend meetings only out of courtesy. If you’ve attended such meetings, you wouldn’t really be bothered to listen to the discussions being carried out. You could mute your speakers, but that would mute all sounds from your computer.

If you’re looking for a way around this problem, we’ve got your back! Keep reading this article to mute zoom meetings without muting your main computer speakers.

Table of Contents

How to Only Mute Zoom Meetings?

You can mute zoom meetings in four ways without muting your computer speakers. You could play around with the volume mixer and even devoid zoom from accessing your computer speakers.

From Volume Mixer

You can mute the application or the browser that is running zooms on your computer. This will mute any sound coming from only the application and not the whole computer in general. The volume mixer is present only in Windows.

Here are the steps you can refer to if you own a device running Windows:

Right-click on the speaker icon from the system tray to your right.
Select Open volume mixer.
Under Apps, locate Zoom or the browser running the web version of Zoom on your device.
Click on the speaker icon to mute the application.

Change Audio Setting

You can mute the speakers from the Zoom app itself. In this way, any sound from only the Zoom application will be muted.

Similarly, you can change the output audio device to a passive device. You can change the audio device from the Zoom meeting itself. This gives you the liberty to use your computer speakers for other applications.

Refer to these steps to change the output audio settings on Zoom:

Zoom App

You can flicker the Zoom audio settings when you’re outside of a meeting. If you’re not currently in a meeting, follow these steps to alter the audio settings for the Zoom application:

From the home screen, select the cogwheel icon on the top-right corner of your screen.
Select Audio from the sidebar to your left.
Drag the volume slider to the left to mute the speakers.
If you have a spare audio device, drop the menu down on the Speaker section and select the output audio device that is not in use.

Zoom Meeting

If you’re in a Zoom meeting, you can follow along with these steps to change the speaker for the meeting you’re currently attending:

From your meeting, locate the Microphone icon.
Click on the fly-out menu.
Under the Select a Speaker section, select your currently inactive device.

Block Permissions

You can block the speaker permissions if you do not want to hear anything from the browser running the Zoom meeting. When you block such permissions, Zoom cannot access your speakers to play the audio.

Remember to enable the permissions after you’re done with the meeting, or anything you play from the site will be muted.

Refer to the following steps to block the permissions to access your speakers from Google Chrome:

On the window playing the meeting, select the padlock icon from the address bar.
Head to Site Settings.
Under Permissions, scroll down to Sound.
Drop down the menu next to it and choose Mute.

How to Mute Participants in Zoom?

If your meeting doesn’t have enough participants, you could mute individual participants from the meeting. We recommend you only use this method in smaller meetings as it can be tedious to mute all participants individually if the list is long.

Follow these steps to mute individual participants in a Zoom meeting:

If you haven’t already, switch to the window that is running the Zoom meeting.
From the menu bar on the bottom, select Participants.
Select the microphone icon next to the participant’s name on the pop-up to mute the participant.
Repeat step 3 until you’ve muted everyone in the meeting.