Sound should display different icon when muted

[benmccann]

Distribution

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS

Package version

Cinnamon 6.0.4

Graphics hardware in use

No response

Frequency

Always

Bug description

When muting the sound it will show a muted symbol for a second:

Then it will switch to a music symbol:

Steps to reproduce

Mute the sound

Expected behavior

It should stay a muted symbol

Additional information

When clicking the music icon it says "Chrome - Stopped"

[ygerlach]

If you have music running (:musical_note: icon shown) and then mute your system, it shows the muted icon for 3 seconds and then switches back. See this contant: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/blob/f32fbb04456aab1de7403e7954bf5a379a315bbb/files/usr/share/cinnamon/applets/sound%40cinnamon.org/applet.js#L24

So it looks to me, like this is a design decision. Is there a reason, why the current music player is more important than the mute icon?

[benmccann]

Oh, I see. It seems that it is trying to display the current volume for three seconds when adjusting the volume and then switches to show the music player icon. This makes sense when adjusting the volume, but is a bit funny when the sound is muted

One of the things that's frustrating here is that even with the sound unmuted, my computer isn't actually playing any sound. I guess I must have some tab in Chrome which has a paused video or something, but it's super difficult to figure out which one that might be. It just says "Chrome - Stopped". After a lot of searching I found chrome://media-internals/, which helped me find one webpage with an ad containing a stopped video, but it shows two other stopped audio sources with not enough detail to figure out where they're coming from or what they are.

I find myself jumping on to zoom calls and not realizing the sound is muted, which frequently added an extra minute or two of frustration to the beginning of a call trying to figure out where the problem resides. Now I know it's one of the first things to check, but would still prefer to see it at a glance before hopping on a call instead of having to right-click the icon after something's gone wrong

There are a few potential changes that could be made here:

• mute could be considered to be not the same as other volume changes such that the mute icon is always shown when muted
• filter out Chrome. E.g. if I press the play button in this UI it remains stopped.
• the music note could only be shown if there's actually audio playing and not if there's stopped audio
• the mute icon currently uses a much lighter shading. Perhaps that same lighter fill color should be used on the music note icon when muted if we do not prefer showing the mute icon. It could also potentially have a diagonal line drawn through it the same as the mute icon. This would indicate that a music player is open, but muted

The first idea makes the most sense to me