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Mozilla The Internet

I Dream of Silence From My Web Browser? 87

Posted by Cliff from the flash-wav-files-should-have-a-mute-function dept.
BRAINBUZ asks: "I'm finding more and more web-pages are blasting sound at me. Everyone who chooses to blast sound at me seems to manage to make their sound files much louder than what I was trying to listen to. I am finding this to be even more annoying than popups -- at least with pop-ups I could click the X and be done with it, pages with sound don't give an option to turn it off without closing the browser, or muting all sound. When I can, I avoid sites with sound, but just today I was checking my balance on one of my credit cards only to have some awful noise nearly blow out my speakers from one of their ads, for themselves. Opera has a feature to turn off sound in web pages, which doesn't work on most noisy pages. Haven't been able to find a similar option in Firefox or IE. The next killer feature, what I really want from my browser, is the ability to shut every web site up. I get security warnings from my browsers all of the time, why can't I get a warning about every media file (whether it be audio, video, flash, ActiveX or Java based) on the page that wants to play and the option to play or not play them?"
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I Dream of Silence From My Web Browser? More

I Dream of Silence From My Web Browser?

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  • FlashMute (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13, 2006 @09:50PM (#14469019)
    FlashMute [indev.no] - cross-browser Flash muting.
  • ...in this situation. Here I am reading the news/video game article/PC article when all of a sudden a car insurance ad BLASTS at me with a screeching car sound. You can substitute screeching car sound with any conceivable annoying sound in existance. My solution? Adblock the hell out of them.

  • disconnect your speakers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mkcmkc ( 197982 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @09:54PM (#14469039)
    I run with my speakers (including that stupid internal one) disconnected all the time, unless there's something I want to hear. That solves about 99% of the problem. Don't install Flash plugins--that's an additional help.

    • Re:disconnect your speakers (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bob whoops ( 808543 ) <bobwhoops@NoSPaM.gmail.com> on Friday January 13, 2006 @10:33PM (#14469196) Homepage
      There is something I want to hear most of the time. My music.

      • Re:disconnect your speakers (Score:5, Funny)

        by ResidntGeek ( 772730 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @10:40PM (#14469215) Journal
        It's not YOUR music, it's the RIAA's music! You're DAMN lucky they allow you to listen, even if you paid for it! Count your blessings!
        • > It's not YOUR music, it's the RIAA's music!

          Ack, no, you've got to be kidding! I don't listen to that thrice-becursed noise. Yeesh.

          I listen to *real* music. You know, music that contains not just sound but actual *music*, i.e., counterpoint. Most of the really good stuff was written before 1750, so the RIAA has no claim on it, since it's older than they or their various member organizations and labels.

          (Okay, okay, so sometimes a modern performer will see fit to record some of the good stuff, and in

          • Most of the really good stuff was written before 1750, so the RIAA has no claim on it

            You mean NMPA/Harry Fox/ASCAP/BMI has no claim on the underlying musical works. RIAA members, on the other hand, have state law copyright in sound recordings of those musical works, which isn't limited by any "limited Times" clause (because it isn't granted by the federal government) and which Congress has agreed to let continue until 2067.

    • Everyone who chooses to blast sound at me seems to manage to make their sound files much louder than what I was trying to listen to

      In other words, he listens to music at a reasonable volume, and then disruptive flash ads pop up with blaringly-loud noises/voices/etc. So unplugging the speakers is not a reasonable answer.

      Personally, unplugging speakers would never be an answer. All OS's tend to have a "mute" option on audio out... so why would you reach around for speaker wires. Moreover, a better soluti

      • All OS's tend to have a "mute" option on audio out... so why would you reach around for speaker wires.

        Because I've been using (and programming) computers long enough to know that software sucks. If you absolutely need something to work, no matter what, don't do it with software. If you absolutely don't want to hear sound from your speakers--unplug them.

        As for the part about wanting to listen to music, I'd suggest that killing off plugins will still solve most of the problem. And for mp3's, a standalon

  • Most of these are flash... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry DOT matt54 AT yahoo DOT com> on Friday January 13, 2006 @09:58PM (#14469052)
    Most of these sounds come from Flash objects. You can block Flash with FlashBlock [mozilla.org]. It puts a play button where the Flash object is. As an alternative, I would recommend using NoScript [mozilla.org]. It allows you to block JavaScript, Flash, Java, and other plugins and then whitelist sites that you go to all of the time. You can enable Flash, Java, and plugins by clicking to play like with FlashBlock. If you are just visiting for a moment then you can temporarily enable for that site just for your browser session. I've found that this fixes all of the sound issues that you are talking about.

    only to have some awful noise nearly blow out my speakers from one of their ads, for themselves.
    Then install AdBlock [mozilla.org]and the AdBlock Filterset.G Updater [mozilla.org]. Ads that play sounds are yet another reason in a long list why I block ads myself. Some people don't agree with blocking ads. Well, make up your own mind on what to do. Personally I take the approach that several bad advertisers ruin it for everyone so I block them all.
  • Updated Hosts file ...
    Firefox: Adblock (filterset.G), NoScript (set to block flash as well)

    No sound from any webpages yet!

  • Many sites play sounds at whatever volume level they found the file recorded at, which can vary from file to file, and Windows normalizes nothing. Also Firefox will play sounds not in the currently active window (or maybe it's just another tab in the same window, I'm not for certain), so I've had to hunt it down. To make things even worse, Midi and waveform generating files get different volume settings and it's not always clear which one you're dealing with.
  • Use Firefox with https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=722&application=firefox [mozilla.org]noscript extension.
    Noscript will block alle javascript, flash, and media files.
    You can then choose which ones to enable.

    Try it.

  • 2 soundcards maybe??? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by baton ( 70213 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @10:09PM (#14469105)
    If the reason you dont want sounds is because your say listening to music via another app you could get a 2nd sound output device (say a cheap usb 'soundcard') make that primary ound output and not plug anything into it. Then set your sound app to use the other soundcard that has speakers on it.

    You shouldn't have to goto these lengths to do it, but it would work.
    • Now that's the kind of out-of-the-box thinking I like to see. We get more of that and a little bit of Bruce Willis and we might just be able to save this rock. All kidding aside, that's a remarkable idea.
    • If you're going to do this, why not just use /dev/null as the primary output device? Save the expense of using an extra sound card.
    • Chances are it's possible you're using the onboard sound from your motherboard anyway. What I did a while ago is buy myself a nice SoundBlaster, mostly because I wanted surround sound and my previous card didn't do it, My default sound device is my onboard card, and all "approved" apps have their ouput set to use the SoundBlaster which is hooked up to a nice surround sound set of speakers, the onboard sound is plugged into the shitty speakers built into my monitor (which are usually muted).

      This provides a n
  • I've gone to both streaming and flash web sites lately, and I can't figure out what the webmaster is thinking.

    It guarantees I will not return willingly.

  • Your bank? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by strikethree ( 811449 )
    You say you were checking your balance. I would assume that this is your bank. Have you considered writing/calling them and letting them exactly how annoying a full-blast sound is? I am sure they would not tolerate such loud sounds inside of their bank, so I really do not think they would approve of such loud sounds coming from their website. The website was likely designed by an external company with little oversight by the bank.

    Of course, this only fixes one sight. Have you thought of writing a plug-in fo

    • Re:Your bank? (Score:4, Funny)

      by ClamIAm ( 926466 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @05:20AM (#14470267)
      I would assume that this is your bank.

      Only one way to find out. Get the name of the president of the bank, stand directly outside of his office with a megaphone, and shout "Mr. Phillips! WOULD YOU LIKE A BIGGER PENIS?"

    • Re:Your bank? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by timmyf2371 ( 586051 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @05:50AM (#14470313)
      An alternative to simply writing to your bank; you could use one of those Birthday cards which plays an annoying and repetitive tune when opened, and simply compose a clear and concise letter within letting the bank know how annoying sound can be when trying to work or relax. You'd also have the added advantage that the advisor dealing with your complaint would be able to fully appreciate just how frustrating unexpected and unwanted noise can be.
      • I have a great one: not only does it play sound, but it's got flashing LEDs too! My roommate's parents sent it to her from Paris.

        She was going to throw it away but I grabbed it because it has about two dozen white LEDs decorating the Eiffel tower on the front.
    • I was tempted to close the account and tell them the reason was getting blasted when trying to check my balance. But the credit card's been open over 7 years, since I don't carry balances on it, closing the account would lower my credit scores. The idiocy of Credit Scoring is worth another RANT or more but not in this reply.
  • Ok, this is a little bit of work, but on the Mac, I can use Audio Hijack [rogueamoeba.com] (Pro) for this purpose -- hijack the browser, then hit the Mute button in Audio Hijack. I also find this useful when the browser's volume balance is out-of-whack with iTunes -- I can hijack the output volume and lower it. All in all, I've found Audio Hijack Pro very useful, for more than just these purposes.

  • Every now and then... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Gadren ( 891416 )
    ...I think that Flash is one of the worst things to happen to the Web. Maybe it's just frustration, but do we really need to slowly fading buttons on a corporate website?
    • It's not just the web.

      Some of the colleges in my region use a product called LearnKey that relies heavily on Flash both for instruction and examination, and it's horribly broken. I don't think it's so much a flaw with Flash itself as that the person who wrote the software was completely clueless, but I've yet to see a session with the software where at least two or three of its Flash portions didn't crap out or lock up. Especially on multi-part questions in the quizzes... "Hey, it wouldn't go to the next pa
  • ...in Soviet Russia, Flash mutes YOU!
  • Many of the myspace.com profiles have 1 of these 3 ways of emitting sound

    1. flash
    2. streamed wmv
    3. bgsound src=

    I can block flash, but has anyone figured out the others, especially if I could specifically target it at webpages form myspace.

    greasemonkey script?

    I use flashblock and ad block already, I will check out this no script thing. Anything else?
    • OK I am dumb, I just updated my hosts file with this

      127.0.0.1 www.videocodezone.com
      127.0.0.1 videocodezone.com

      I believe that is where most of the wmv music videos come form on myspace.

      Looking for hightech answers and it turns out the old school hosts file does the trick, no more annoying sounds.
  • I browsed through the menus of both Internet Explorer and Firefox and found a setting, similar to the one in Opera, in Internet Explorer.

    Go to Tools->Options->Advanced->Multimedia

    I was unable to find any such options on Firefox, but maybe I missed it somehow. I looked for an extension on the Mozilla site as well, but I didn't have any luck.

    Like Opera, however, the sound setting in Internet Explorer doesn't stop Flash Ads.

  • noscript blocks javavascpipt, flash and java on a site by site basis witch should prevent sound from playing. noscript.net
  • I got so tired of unexpected sounds, I leave on mute. When I want to hear sounds, I unmute. Not very elegant, I grant you, but it works.
     
  • Kind of esoteric, and not extremely practical, but you can have one sound card (or even your voice modem's audio channel) as Windows' default sound playback device with no speakers attached, then play your desired program through the second card. This will only work with apps where you can specify where to send the output, but it's an option. I'm running on-board sound plus a mult-channel rackmount sound interface, and it'll do this.

  • email (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One can always complain to the sites and the parent company of whatever is being advertised. If you take the time write up a polite but firm complaint, just copy and paste it and send it off to the contact addy. Something along these lines, obviously write your own. "Dear sir/madam: Your advertisement x at site y contains an intrusive flash animation and sound package that is quite startling and annoying. In a business situation, the last thing you would want to do is to annoy any potential customers. It "g
  • Neglecting to modprobe snd-pcm-oss seems to kill browser sound quite effectively on my ALSA-based system.
    • Not the idea. It definitely works.

      It's pathetic that you would even think of it.

      It's more pathetic that I understand what you're saying.
  • If you're never going to use sound, why even have it installed in the browser? When I upgraded for firefox 1.5 I intentionally did not install mozplugger so now stuff can't play sound no matter what. Similarly I don't like my PC speaker, so I didn't compile support for it in the kernel. Settings may change and get reset, but if it's not supported it sure isn't going to be doing much :) Unfortunately I don't know much about the Windows builds other than I think they come with all that stuff enabled by defaul
    • > If you're never going to use sound, why even have it installed in the browser?

      Indeed, I was until this thread blissfully unaware that there *was* sound-playing capability in modern browsers. I have unpleasant memories of Netscape 3.x playing extremely annoying MIDI files (a significantly sped-up version of the I Love You song from Barney & Friends springs immediately to mind...), but I had assumed that such garbage had been thrown out with the other major atrocities of that era, such as Javascript
      • Yes, mozplugger is an extension that allows you to use mplayer with firefox to play movies and sounds. I installed it because I thought I would like it better than download videos and then opening them, I was wrong.

        dd if=/dev/zero of=`sed -n "s/\(.*\)\s.*win.*/\1/ip"`
  • I find that an awfull lot of game sites nowadays come with flash trailers with sound. This is perfectly acceptable up to a point. They are trying to sell me a full 3D surround sound feast for the eye and ear and well doing that in pure HTML is apparently to difficult.

    So completly blocking flash or just disable all sound is not worth it to me.

    So gee, what other option do I have to disable sound from ads. Hmmm. Though one.

    Oh wait maybe I can block ads? Nah, I am not skilled enough for this and I am sure no

  • If it's ads that contain these annoying sounds, just block the ads. Hit them where it hurts. I recommend Proxomitron [proxomitron.info] because it runs as a proxy and hence covers all all your browsers simultaneously (but you can ad rules for individual browsers with header matching).

    Alternatively, if you just use Firefox, you can try the Adblock extension but, personally, Proxo is alot more powerful. If you're comfortable with regex, willing to learn a few $commands()'s, it's the way to go.

    Unfortunately it's Windows only, an
    • For those not using Windows, Privoxy [privoxy.org] is also capable of blocking ads based on both location and other characteristics (eg. size). I also successfully used it to block Opera's ads and replace them with a grey bar the same colour as the rest of the window, back when it was ad-supported.

  • How about Vista? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by David Horn ( 772985 ) <david@pockRABBIT ... minus herbivore> on Saturday January 14, 2006 @08:09AM (#14470548) Homepage
    Yeah, I know it's a wait and I know it's Windows, but apparently you'll be able to control the volume of individual programs.
    • Yeah, I know it's a wait and I know it's Windows, but apparently you'll be able to control the volume of individual programs.
      Yeah, and it comes with Duke Nukem Forever and a cure for cancer, oh and I hear there's a winning lottery ticket in every box too.
  • You are posting this to the wrong place. This is a great idea and would make a fantastic addition to firefox other options. But you should really suggest this to the firefox team.

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product =Firefox&format=guided [mozilla.org]

    You can enter the feature in bugzilla as a "Wishlist" item. You never know they too might think this is a great idea.

    N.

    • You are posting this to the wrong place. This is a great idea and would make a fantastic addition to firefox other options. But you should really suggest this to the firefox team.

      I thought the point was that we discuss it here before we discuss it on Bugzilla because we don't want to waste developers' time with dupes.

  • This is a phenomena that I wasn't even aware of :0

    But it does raise an interesting question :

    How do you peons end up on /. ?

  • Just use Linux (Score:2, Funny)

    by fatrat ( 324232 )

    Just put linux on a cutting edge laptop - volia, no sound :)
  • This seems pretty straightforward to me...

    If it's flash (as many claim), then you have your answer: no flash.

    If it's not flash (doesn't *have* to be), then just disable the ability of the browser to play it automatically:

    Tools->Options->Downloads->File Types box. Remove anything that makes sound :-) Granted, you'll break other things (I'm thinking movies - make those play by something with seperate volume control), but you won't get sound!

    HTH and that I'm not missing anything :)

    --LWM
  • Simple - use an older linux kernel with oss drivers and play whatever you want on xmms, maybe have a "silent" track that just repeats (but don't violate Cage's copyright on silence either now....) xmms will lock /dev/dsp, and nothing else will be able to play sound. Oh, and other things trying to play sound tend to lock up...
    • > (but don't violate Cage's copyright on silence either now....)

      Cage doesn't have a copyright on silence. You can't copyright a mere idea such as silence. What Cage copyrighted is a particular _expression_ of silence. So unless you are copying some elements of his expression (e.g., including factors like making your tracks the same length as his movements, or having somebody actually sit at a piano and not play), you are in no danger whatsoever of violating his copyright just by having a silent track.

  • Is there an audio equivalent to the CSS "display:none" property that can zap specific page elements?

  • Firefox has no native sound-producing capabilities. All of the sound is produced by media or applets that invoke a plug-in (Windows Media, Quicktime, Flash, Java applets, etc.). This would be impossible to write into the Firefox code. The only reasonable way to adjust this is to use Downloads: View & Edit Actions and modify all audio types to save to disk. Someone mentioned something about a flash muter, which would then also take care of Flash animations. It is rather uncommon for Java applets to
  • Along with many annoying things showing up as Flash content, having the plugin enabled gives us one more place for potential security problems [eeye.com].

    Known or not, vulnerabilities relating to images and Flash existed for a very long time. Considering that offsite content greatly increased the potential exposure of even a selective surfer, perhaps it's worth reconsidering very aggressive blocking/filtering and disabling non-essential plugins.

    I haven't looked closely enough at the control offered by Firefox plugins
  • It's cure rather than prevention but when I'm faced with these things (and animating ads that pull the eye away from whatever I'm trying to read) I use this nifty Zap Plugins bookmarklet [squarefree.com] which I keep within easy reach on my browser's toolbar. Apparently it works on IE, Firefox and Opera.
  • It's called volume control!
  • Naviscope is what I use to solve problems like this. It's a Windows only freebie that is, unfortunately, no longer supported or in development but I've been using it for over five years without any problems save one (more on that later). I'm afraid you'll have to search for it. Version 8.70 was the last.

    Naviscope is a web proxy that I have successfully used with IE, FF, and Opera, has programmable prefetch (can be set to delay on page load), DNS caching, and time sync and more. It has a default block

  • When I am running AIM (aol instant messanger) It sometimes runs noisy, annoying ads. I was wondering if there is anyway or removing the ads without having to get a mod that requires an earlier version of the program.

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