Muting individual programs via the Dock

[digitalgutenberg]

Prerequisites

• [x] I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates.

Feature

Often you don't want to mute all sound, you just want to mute the output of a single program that runs in the background. Let’s say you have firefox minimized and you want to mute it quickly without also muting spotify or vlc. Normally you would have to open firefox, and painstakingly hunt down the individual tab you want to mute.

Describe the solution you'd like Muting/unmuting individual programs via the dock, with a single click!

Existing work A while ago I had the chance to try out Latte Dock for the first time, and this is how I discovered this feature. This is the kind of feature I did not know I needed before I tried Latte; yet it turned out to be a surprisingly handy feature. In Latte Dock, programs with an audio output are marked with a little icon. You are then able to toggle sound on/off by clicking on it.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Alternative 1: To closely follow Latte’s implementation. A small “audio icon” displayed on top of the programs with active audio output, that can be clicked to toggle the sound on/off.

• Alternative 2: Instead of an “audio icon” indicating sound output, one could for example use a discreet animation (ex: pulsating glow) to indicate programs with active audio. Programs that have been muted could then be dimmed or darkened to indicate this. One could then use a keyboard shortcut combined with a mouse click to toggle audio on/off. (For example Super – Left Click.)

• Alternative 3: To mute/unmute programs via the “Right Click” menu.

For all of the alternatives above: this feature doesn’t even have to be the default behavior, but could be enabled in the preferences.

[ricotz]

CC @danrabbit @cassidyjames

[danirabbit]

My inclination is not to use the dock for this and instead to make sure we show all apps that are producing sound in the sound indicator

[cassidyjames]

I agree; seems a little weird to put this into the dock when we already have a place to manage sound.

[danirabbit]

Going to close as design conflict since the sound indicator seems to be where we want to manage volume etc for apps