Remember those good old days when we have to open a separate browser window for each website. Then came tabbed browsing and the game changed from then on. Users now have many tabs open in a session and sometimes managing those different tabs can be a hard task. Things can get irritating when one of the tab suddenly starts playing loud music. This sound can be played by any one of the tabs that is open.
A solution in this situation is to mute system sound by clicking on that volume button from system tray. But doing this will mute all sounds, even the one playing with your favorite music player. You wouldn’t want to mute that music player. Or you can close all the open tabs to stop that annoying music.
Mute or Stop Sound from Google Chrome
Enter MuteTab, a Google Chrome extension that helps you track down where a sound is coming from by displaying a list of all possible sound sources. This extension can mute the tab which is playing sound.
Install this extension and then you’ll be able to see a new “music” icon in your address bar. Left-click on it and it will present you with a list of all open tabs. There are different links for:
- Show: Bring this tab to the front (make this tab active)
- Mute (unsafe): Mute a particular tab
- Mute (safe): Play sound from a particular tab
- Close: Close the tab
This extension makes it easy for you to navigate between different tabs. To mute a particular tab, just click on “mute (unsafe)”. Upon testing this feature on YouTube, the video also paused automatically. And when you want to listen the sound from that tab again, then click on “mute (safe)”. Click on “show” to make that tab active.
The developer can make this extension great by properly giving labels instead of safe and unsafe and also by using icons instead of simple links to do the task.
Right-click on the icon of this extension and click on “options”. This will open settings panel where you can do various settings like auto-mute all the tabs, except the one you’re currently viewing. You can also set preferences to display possible sound sources or hide sound sources. If you play flash games, then its a good idea to check mark “don’t automute when state can’t be restored”.
Just in case, if you open a new tab, start playing sound in that tab and can’t find the tab in the list, then click on “update all”. This will update or refresh the extension to detect new tabs.
If you’re using Firefox, then you can also mute Firefox.
Leave a Reply