White Noise

Thursday, February 3, 2005 10: 23 AM

I've spent the past few minutes trying to do a simple thing -- listen to music on my computer at work. Unfortunately my music is being mashed-up by at least two other websites that insist on pumping out ethereal background music (noise?) to add ambience to their design. This wouldn't be a problem if I only had a few windows open, but currently I have 50+ tabs open in a few different Firefox windows.

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50+ tabs you ask? Why yes 50+, see I use Firefox with the Session Saver extension. It has become an integral part of how I work, both professionally and personally. I visit a ton of design sites each day -- often CTRL clicking (Command click on Mac) on links from these sites to open the new links in the background. Sometimes I've opened 20 tabs in the background from a single design site. I'm opening them to review throughout the day as time allows. If I don't get to them today, they will be there tomorrow thanks to Session Saver (it automatically opens all the tabs you had up when you last closed Firefox).

SO...here is where my problems begin...when I start the day with 20-50 tabs automatically opening in Firefox and a couple of them are playing background music, I have to go hunt down those sites, find the "Music: On / Off" option (which can be a challenge in and of itself) and turn it off. This, my friends, can annoy me to no end.

While I appreciate the creativity behind this type of “immersive” experience, I find myself constantly annoyed by it. Maybe I'm in the minority here? But typically the music does little to add to my experience -- in fact it usually makes finding the "On / Off" switch my first order of business on the site-- instead of appreciating the design and digging into what they have to offer.

Comments (7)

Comments by single fin:

i swing into your site every now & again.
thought you might like this link:
www.kexp.org

you might already know of it already but figured it was worth dropping off to you anyhow.
alohas
single fin ~

Comments by kuno:

I too am constantly annoyed by sound on sites. I tend to notice it immediately and will deal with it right away. I tend to do a quick scan over the offending site to see if it has any redeeming value which can keep me there despite the sound issue. Even if I do not close such a site right away, I will spend my effort on getting out of there as soon as possible. Often I will not bother to find the off button for the music, it's easier to pause whatever else is playing by hitting pause on a multimedia keyboard and hitting that button again to resume once I've dealt with the offender :).

Comments by Lance:

Paul, this is also a big problem for me! I usually have 10 - 20 tabs open in various Firefox windows, and it takes me a few minutes like you said to find the offending site. One thing I've found is the the best sites usually only play the music for a short spell, maybe 15 - 30 seconds. Then it's off and the ITunes can blare again!
I was looking last night on Google (because this happened to me yesterday in fact) for a way to disallow music from even coming on...but I haven't found a good solution yet for overriding the music on a given site. I agree with Kuno, though, sometimes I just turn down or pause my music and let the site music play.

Cool blog by the way, love the brown redesign.

Comments by Garrett:

If you're having this problem on a Mac, you can use Rogue Amoeba's Detour to mute the audio from Firefox (or Safari, or any other app). If you're on a PC... well, you might be screwed. I don't know of a similar app for Windows.

Comments by Karolina:

I think the ideal solution would be an on/off button in the browsers. Just a way to turn off all sound originating from pages open in the browser... Like the above mentioned Detour thing but incorporated directly within the browser, with an option to turn off sound either on a tab/window basis or in all open tabs/windows... Don't know if this is technically possible, but it sure would be sweet.

Comments by paul haine:

I think the ideal solution would be that web designers just *stop* including these irritating little 'ambient' Flash loops on their pages. They're the aural equivalent of the popup ad.

Band websites and designer websites tend to be the worst offenders.

Comments by Jeremy:

If the websites are loading midi (hardly likely with design sites, I imagine), midi has a separate volume control in the volume control panel. It may be called Synth. Another thing you can try with firefox is disabling the wav plug in options under the download section.

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