How to Share Audio on FaceTime Calls

You’re on a FaceTime call and you want to play a song for someone. Maybe it’s a YouTube video you’ve been talking about, a Spotify playlist, or a sound clip from a file on your desktop. You hit play, expecting the other person to hear it, and they hear nothing. Or they hear a faint, muffled version of the audio bleeding through your MacBook’s microphone. Not exactly the listening experience you had in mind.

FaceTime on Mac does have a feature for shared media playback. It’s called SharePlay. But SharePlay has a very specific scope, and if what you want to share falls outside that scope, you’re out of luck. Let’s walk through what works, what doesn’t, and how to actually get any audio from your Mac into a FaceTime call.

SharePlay: Great Idea, Limited Reach

SharePlay launched as Apple’s answer to watching and listening together during FaceTime calls. The concept is solid. You start playing a movie or album, everyone on the call gets synced playback on their own device, and you can react together in real time.

The catch is that SharePlay only works with apps that have specifically built in support for it. Apple Music and Apple TV work great. A handful of third-party apps have added SharePlay support too. But the list is short, and it doesn’t cover the places where most people actually find the content they want to share.

Here’s what SharePlay won’t help you with:

• YouTube videos. No SharePlay support in a browser.
• Spotify. No SharePlay integration.
• SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or any niche music platform. None of these support SharePlay.
• Local audio or video files. If you have an MP3 or a video file on your Mac, SharePlay can’t touch it.
• A random website or web app playing audio. SharePlay has no concept of arbitrary browser audio.

If the content you want to share happens to be in Apple Music or Apple TV, SharePlay is the smoothest option. For everything else, you need a different approach.

Screen Sharing in FaceTime: Close, But Not Quite

FaceTime does let you share your screen during a call. You might assume this would include audio too, since you’re sharing what’s happening on your Mac. On iOS, screen sharing in FaceTime does pass through device audio. On macOS, it doesn’t. Your screen gets shared, but the audio stays on your end.

This means you can show someone what you’re looking at, but they can’t hear it. If you’re trying to share a music video, a podcast clip, or any other audio content, screen sharing on Mac is effectively useless for that purpose. It’s a visual-only feature.

The Low-Tech Approach (We’ve All Done This)

Let’s be honest. At some point, you’ve held your phone up to your computer speaker so someone on a call could hear what was playing. Or you’ve cranked your Mac’s volume and hoped your MacBook microphone would pick up enough of the audio to be recognizable.

It kind of works. In the same way that taking a photo of your screen with your phone kind of works. The audio quality is terrible, background noise bleeds in, and the person on the other end usually says “I can barely hear it, can you turn it up?” before you max out the volume and introduce distortion on top of everything else.

This is a last resort, not a solution. You deserve better.

The Real Solution: A Virtual Audio Cable

The reason none of the built-in options work well is a fundamental limitation of macOS. Apple keeps audio outputs (your speakers) and audio inputs (your microphone) completely separate. FaceTime can only listen to microphone inputs. It has no way to grab the audio playing through your speakers, regardless of what app is producing it.

The fix is to create a virtual microphone that takes your system audio and presents it as a mic input. When FaceTime sees this virtual mic, it captures whatever your Mac is playing and sends it to the other person on the call. This approach is sometimes called a “virtual audio cable” because it’s like running a cable from your output back to your input, except it’s all digital with no quality loss.

How to Set This Up with Soundshine

Soundshine is a macOS menu bar app that creates a virtual microphone from your system audio. It installs a lightweight audio driver, and once it’s running, any app that accepts a microphone input (FaceTime included) can capture your system audio.

Here’s how to share audio on your next FaceTime call:

1. Install Soundshine. The app includes a guided setup wizard that installs the audio driver. It takes about 30 seconds.

2. Turn on audio routing. Click the Soundshine icon in your menu bar and toggle audio routing on. Your system audio is now being sent to the virtual microphone.

3. Set your Mac’s input device. Open System Settings > Sound and under “Input,” select Soundshine Microphone. FaceTime uses whatever input device is set here.

4. Start your FaceTime call. The other person will hear everything playing on your Mac. YouTube, Spotify, a local file, a browser tab, anything.

5. Play whatever you want to share. Hit play, and the audio goes straight through the call at full digital quality.

That’s it. No workarounds, no holding your laptop up to a speaker, no praying that SharePlay supports the app you need.

What About Your Voice?

If you set the input device to Soundshine’s virtual mic, FaceTime sends your system audio to the call. But what about your voice?

You have a couple of options. The simplest is to switch your input device back to your regular microphone when you’re done sharing audio. It’s a quick toggle in System Settings or you can use the Sound menu in your menu bar. If you need to talk and share audio at the same time, you can create an aggregate audio device in macOS’s Audio MIDI Setup utility that combines your real mic and the Soundshine virtual mic into a single input. That way, the other person hears both your voice and your system audio simultaneously.

For most calls, toggling between your real mic and Soundshine as needed is the simplest approach.

Quick Summary

• SharePlay works well for Apple Music and Apple TV content, but doesn’t support YouTube, Spotify, local files, or browser audio.
• FaceTime screen sharing on Mac shares your screen visually but does not include system audio.
• Holding your phone up to the speaker technically works, but the quality is awful and you know it.
• A virtual audio cable like Soundshine routes your system audio to a virtual mic that FaceTime can use. It works with every app, sounds clean, and takes about a minute to set up.

Sharing audio on a FaceTime call shouldn’t be this complicated. Until Apple builds native audio routing into macOS, a lightweight virtual audio device is the cleanest way to get the job done.