[SOLVED] Is there way to mute sound from single application?
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Distribution: openSUSE, Raspbian, Slackware. Previous: MacOS, Red Hat, Coherent, Consensys SVR4.2, Tru64, Solaris
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Originally Posted by byron.hawkins
Just a note that this feature is no longer available, at least not in pavucontrol 4.0. There is no way to modify the volume level per application.
It may still be there but, if memory serves, applications don't actually show up in pavucontrol unless they're actually running and playing audio. So... you're stuck reacting to the application's audio than having the ability to control it in the first place. Unless, as you mentioned, by going into each application and tweaking the sound level. For me, that'd be a royal PITA as I may have several browser windows opened on different activities and would have to look at each one to figure out which activity and browser tab is playing audio.
I've had some luck with this kind of problem using Jack (esp. jack_mixer). If the application is "Jack aware", I can configure it to run its audio to Jack and define a channel for it in jack_mixer and keep that slider turned way down unless I want to listen to it (or mute it entirely). If the application can only run its audio through PulseAudio (PA) I can still control that using a dedicated PA channel in jack_mixer. The downside is that all applications running their audio through PA are affected by my jack_mixer slider setting. It's been working out well for me as jack_mixer doesn't eat up too much screen real estate and I can configure it to be visible on all of my KDE activities for quick access.
In both Firefox and Chrome, you can see tabs that are playing audio easily. At the top of each tab, beside the name, there will be a speaker icon if audio is playing. You can click it to mute the audio from that tab. It can still be a pain if you have multiple windows open, of course.
I've had some luck with this kind of problem using Jack...
Cool, I will give that a try.
@sgosnell: The tab-by-tab solution in the doesn't work for me because the sound I want to mute is just the annoying "ding" when I get a Facebook message. Since it isn't an audio stream, the little audio icon disappears after nanoseconds, so I can't catch it. Fortunately the Fedora audio panel does hold the firefox slider for about 0.7 seconds, so I have been able to snag the mute button before it goes away, and it remembers to stay muted.
I don't do facebook, so I don't know for sure how it works, but it might be a system sound. Pulseaudio does make it easy to mute system sounds. It's on the Playback page of the volume control. Muting that might or might not work.
Distribution: openSUSE, Raspbian, Slackware. Previous: MacOS, Red Hat, Coherent, Consensys SVR4.2, Tru64, Solaris
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Originally Posted by byron.hawkins
Cool, I will give that a try.
Jack does require some configuration. There's the Jack config itself plus the scripts that you can (and I do) use to start/stop sound related processes. If you go this route, let me know---I can post (or attach) some of what I've cobbled together to get Jack working for me.
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