The Media Disruption
When you are listening to Apple Music or a podcast on your Mac and you suddenly need absolute silence, the quickest reflex is to tap the Mute key (F10) on your keyboard. However, macOS often intercepts this specific keystroke and assumes that because you have muted the system volume, you also want to immediately pause whatever media is currently playing in the background. While this is intended to prevent you from missing parts of a song or podcast while the system is muted, it can be highly disruptive if you merely wanted to temporarily silence an intrusive notification or a noisy webpage.
Decoupling Mute from Playback
To stop macOS from automatically pausing your active media players when the system volume is muted, you need to adjust how the operating system handles the F-row media keys. Unfortunately, there is no direct GUI toggle for this specific interaction, so you must use a terminal command to change the default behavior of the core audio daemon.
Open the Terminal application (found in Applications > Utilities). Type the following command exactly as written: defaults write com.apple.systemsound com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled -int 0 and press Enter. This modifies the core audio preference file to decouple the system-wide mute function from the media playback controls. You must restart your Mac for the daemon to reload its configuration. After the reboot, pressing the mute key will instantly silence the speakers, but your music or podcasts will continue playing silently in the background without being paused.