Chrome launches new audio focus feature!
Interested in cool new Chrome features? “Manage audio focus across tabs to improve the audio mixing” enables you to customize your audio preferences in Chrome.
You have probably ended up many times with multiple audio sources playing at the same time in your Chrome browser, and you surely know how annoying this could be, especially when you need to click on each tab to stop them. Fortunately, a new feature in Chrome Dev for desktop and Chrome OS has been launched by Google just now, which will put an end to that. It ensures that only one audio source is playing at a time and saves you from the annoyance of the multiple sources of audio playing simultaneously. From now on, thanks to this new feature, Chrome will play audio only on the active site, provided that it has one, and will stop the sounds from other open tabs, instead of playing them all in the background.
The feature is not enabled by default, that’s why users who prefer to play some low volume music and some voice audio simultaneously can still do that. However, those of you, who mind playing multiple audio sources and wish to enable the feature, can activate it from the Chrome settings, where you can easily adjust it to fit your preferences. The easiest way to do that is to launch the Chrome browser and type the following address in the address bar: chrome://flags/#enable-default-media-session
This will guide you directly to the experimental features page. Just make sure you are using the latest version of Chrome, for the “Manage audio focus across tabs to improve the audio mixing” feature to be available. To enable it, click on the menu underneath and select either “Enable” or “Enable (Flash lowers volume when interrupted by other sound, experimental)”. The first enable option blocks any other audio source, excluding the one from the active site, while the second just lowers the volume of the other source. Then, restart the browser for the settings to take effect.
Blocking the audio through the new feature in Chrome, however, may cause some slight inconvenience in the beginning and may have some issues, since it is still in a test version. For example, if you play some music in the background that you want to listen to while browsing the web, if you come across a site that plays audio, be it an auto-playing advert or a video, the music will stop and the advert will play. At its worst, you will need to go back to the music page to click play each time it stops due to another active site with an audio, that you may come across during your browsing. Google is working on improving the feature and automating that process, but if you don’t find it that useful at the moment, you can easily disable it from the menu we showed you above.
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