How to Change Your iPhone's Ringtone and Media Volume Separately

When you press one of the volume buttons on your iPhone, you'll notice that it changes both the media volume and the ringtone volume together. If you want to reduce your media volume while keeping ringtones loud, you can't easily do so unless you use a clever workaround. However, thanks to Redditor /u/DC5tine, we now have just that.

Set media and ringtone volume separately on your iPhone

To pull this off, you'll need to use Apple's Shortcuts app. First, add /u/DC5tine's Adjust Volume shortcut to the app using this link. Then, open the Shortcuts app and either search for "Adjust Volume" or scroll down until you see it. Long press the shortcut, tap Share, and select Add to Home Screen. Now, tap the Adjust Volume icon on your iPhone's home screen and it'll show you two options: Media and Ringtone. Select the one you want to adjust, use the slider to set your desired volume level, and tap Done. That's it!

Credit: Pranay Parab

At the moment, the only limitation to the shortcut is that it can't read your iPhone's current volume level. That is because iOS doesn't offer a way for Shortcuts to access this information. When you try to change the volume level using the shortcut, you'll notice the slider is always set to 50%. This is just a default value that the slider displays and it doesn't affect your iPhone's actual volume.

The Adjust Volume shortcut will work for any type of media, including Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, YouTube videos, or any other video or audio you wish to play. So long as you use the shortcut to adjust your media volume, your ringtone volume will remain unchanged. In some cases, you may even wish to use the shortcut to set a lower or higher ringtone volume without affecting media volume.

Either way, the shortcut finally allows you to change one setting without impacting the other. Similarly, on the Mac, you'll also need to use a third-party solution to set a different volume level for each app.