Change System Volume from Command Line on Mac OS

By  on  
Mac Volume

Oftentimes the awesome GUI applications we love are simply gloss over a command line functionality.  While I do love a visual app, it's always good to know how to do things from command line, if only for the sake of automation.  I've covered loads of command line secrets, most notably Mac Camera Access, so I wanted to figure out if I could control volume from command line.

Change Mac System Volume

The secret to changing Mac system volume from command line is through osascript:

# Max volume
sudo osascript -e "set Volume 10"

# Mute
sudo osascript -e "set Volume 0"

# 50% volume
sudo osascript -e "set Volume 5"

Values range from 0 (muted) to 10 (maximum volume).  Note that you don't get to see a nice volume change indicator -- the volume simply changes without any feedback.

Recent Features

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Disable Autocomplete, Autocapitalize, and Autocorrect

    Mobile and desktop browser vendors do their best to help us not look like idiots by providing us autocomplete, autocorrect, and autocapitalize features.  Unfortunately these features can sometimes get in the way;  we don't always want or need the help they provide.  Luckily most browsers allow...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Discussion

  1. Akis

    Thank you for this tip. Are you sure that the maximum value is 10? On my Mac with High Sierra, the maximum value get on 7. The 8, 9, 10 also change the value to maximum. I did double check it by viewing the pop-up small window on volume indicator on menu bar.

  2. Simon Andersen

    This is how it’s done on Mojave:

    sudo osascript -e "set volume output volume [0-100]"

    The deprecated way is to specify a number between 0 and 7 for “set volume”

  3. Br. Bill

    Is there a way to similarly look up the current volume setting (let’s say, in Mojave or Catalina)?

  4. Syd Salmon

    Options to get the current volume setting:

    osascript -e 'output volume of (get volume settings)' # show current volume level

    or

    osascript -e 'get volume settings' # show all volume settings

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!