audio Please add Mute on focus lost / or at least a toggle'able setting for it.

[Robonull]

Title explains it all. 
I Alt-tab a lot while in sessions, either to quickly read something/ watch something/ answer messages and whatnot and having a choice for 'mute on focus lost' in my opinion would be a great 'out of game' 'qol' addition. 
Yes i know, i could just mute it from windows everytime i tab out, but yeah... it would be better if this was automated wouldn't it ?
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(If anyone knows of a temporary solution to automate this please let me know too, like a third party solution or smth)

Edited March 31, 2025 by Robonull
added an extra line at the end for a temporary alternative solution req

[Thorfinn]

It would pretty much have to be a toggle, because I have the exact opposite issue -- I want to know if something is trying to gack me, or if a temporal storm rolled in while I was alt-tabbed. Sometimes I find myself waiting for a hive to swarm, so I go stand next to the currently empty hive, alt-tab, and do something else while waiting for the sound to get louder when the skep populates.

Edited April 1, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Robonull]

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

It would pretty much have to be a toggle

as long as there's a choice, its welcome haha ! 

[Broccoli Clock]

Not going to lie, VS is very happy sitting minimised. In fact I've probably added 20 odd hours to each world just from that alone, but I do go into the options and turn the sound down.

If you look in the graphics settings there are "fullscreen" and a "fullscreen always on top" options, and I am guessing it would be easy enough to hook up a blur event to check the rendering option and mute the sounds or not.

Somewhat annoyingly there is no way at a Windows OS level to do this via settings. You could, of course, do this manually, there are several scripts out there, and I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to create an app (python, c#, java, etc) that monitors the focus of apps and mutes the relevant ones when minimised.

Edited April 1, 2025 by Broccoli Clock

[Thorfinn]

6 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

Somewhat annoyingly there is no way at a Windows OS level to do this via settings.

Must not be too terribly difficult to do. If I accidentally leave one of my Audio Interfaces enabled on the task bar, it does this for me. Granted, it's so that whatever DAW or player I'm focused on at the moment doesn't have to compete with everything and its dog, but still. If I switch to a spreadsheet, I really don't want or need the audio to switch away from VS.

I have no idea if you can install the driver without the device, but knockoff FocusRites are available for north of $30, and I've seen knockoff Behringers for under $20, and even a basic audio interface is vastly better sound than onboard sound.

[Broccoli Clock]

14 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Must not be too terribly difficult to do.

In game, yes, should be an absolute doddle, and using the window settings you can determine if the users wants background noise from a non-focussed task. In C# you can attach to the default windows sound class easily, but I think(*) you need to do a bit of shenanigans to control the apps individually. That's not to say it's difficult, it's just not as exposed as you'd like for what seems like a fairly simple task.

In terms of manually doing it on your desktop, and if you enjoy the "syntactical horrors" of python, a quick and easy solution would be to use something like PyCAW.

 

* Might be different now, it's been a while since I've coded c# with any real intent.