add Blacklist

[fchud]

hi.

would be great to have a blacklist to mute only specific background apps.

could be a toggle to change whitelist (aka exceptions) into blacklist.

[nefares]

This may need some larger changes in the code. Will add as feature request

[nefares]

@fchud can you elaborate why a blacklist would be beneficial? It would increase the overhead of maintaining a blacklist of all apps which should be muted. Plus I don't see the added benefit for using it instead of a whitelist.

[fchud]

overhead of maintaining a blacklist of all apps

on the contrary, i have only one app, that i do not want to hear anything from when it is not active.
all other apps probably deserve attention when they use sound - if anything, it is an intended behavior.

in short:
i think, the apps that misuse sound features while being in background are a minority.

[nefares]

Thanks for the clarification. The reason why I opted for a white list approach is because there are a lot of apps (a lot of them are games) out there which simply don't mute when in the background. Updating the blacklist was tedious every time I install something new. So I decided it would be better to just specify the apps which are usually used for audio, which reduces unnecessary user interaction to maintain the list, and a whitelist usually works for everyone without need to add new apps that comes out.

Nonetheless this could be just my experience. Will keep the feature request open and evaluate how a blacklist can be added without too much overhead

[fchud]

yeah, i guess, it makes sense.

[TheWoodsy]

I'd very-much like a blacklist method of operation.

In my use case, I keep missing audio of new applications all the time.

[Silver7758]

Same here. I want to prevent this app from accidentally muting other apps without a user interface.

Example

In this example, ZFGameBrowser.exe is a child process of a game responsible for displaying announcement webpages as well as playing the clicking sounds in the webpage (the beige window on the left). However, it seems to have special ways of presenting the webpage, Background Muter did not recognize it being in either foreground/background. Hence, the process is never unmuted resulting in me having to add it to the exclusion list manually.

The reason I mentioned this case is because there can be similar situations happening on other programs, resulting the user needing to diagnose these problems and sometimes even miss it. This may end up hurting people's user experience with those apps. At this point, it will be much easier to manually add new games to the list.

[nefares]

This is now implemented as Blacklist Mode. The latest version adds a toggle checkbox in the UI. When enabled, the "Never Muted" list becomes an "Only Muted" list — only the processes you explicitly add will be muted in the background, and everything else stays audible. The setting is persisted across sessions.

Closing as completed.