AudioZapper - What You See Is What You Hear

Medium article here: https://medium.com/@ilanbarmagen/did-i-just-fix-chromes-audio-d614c1531bb0

Did I Just Fix Chrome’s Audio? 🔊 Ilan Bar-Magen Aug 14 · 6 min read Or — the biggest historical UX mistake that you’ve always heard, but probably never heard of.

You’ve probably been in that situation: you browse the web all chill and happy, having multiple tabs open — when suddenly your speakers yell at you, they spit on you with the highest volume the most random sounds. You turn down the volume to normal volume, and then realize that its probably coming from a rebellious chrome tab that decided to declare it’s independent at that moment, and shout it out loud. It could be an audio/video ad on a page that auto-refreshed itself, a youtube video that liberated itself… it could be anything. Once upon a time web browsers conspired and made a decision: audio is a notorious free zone, any tab can play any audio at any time, regardless of your attention and totally ignoring your current active tab. The weird default behavior of letting each and every tab to play sounds regardless of other audio channels playing at the same time. How weird is that? The problem becomes bigger when you actually consume more than one tab with audio: what are you supposed to do when you want to zap between two tabs running a video feed? Same like we used to zap between channels back in the good old simpler days of analog TV. Now imagine that those TVs were engineered with that same weird twist: you switch a channel and the audio of the last channel stays in the background. And all the ones from before. After fighting with it for a while, meaning muting the audio before changing each channel, for instance, everyone would’ve given up — and we’d never got to know that couch potato semi-meditative channel zapping experience. The mistake became so obvious when I tried to watch more than one football match in parallel on the Champions League while watching a youtube live video event. There I was, having three video feeds on three different tabs, starting a big chaotic audio party of two different commentators plus all of the surrounding noises, and the live youtube feed. Switching video involved muting the previous tab, and unmuting the new tab. Not the best sports and web viewing experience to say the least. What I expected was to be able to have one sacred audio channel that will always play what I see, and at any case always just one of them. Seriously, is there any human that can really listen to more than one audio channel? Sure, we can listen to music in the background — indeed a very common use case, but a very specific one — it doesn’t justify making it the default case. So how come that's the default case? In computing there is a term “WYSIWYG” — “What You See Is What You Get”, I want to have “WYSIWYH” — “What You See Is What You Hear”. The default state should be that you can hear only the tab that you consume, unless you want it otherwise. The option to make an audio channel to stay in the background should be on demand, and not the current state where the on-demand action is muting other tabs, on a muting Whac-A-Mole frenzy. Our basic ability is to process and listen and focus on one main pro-dominate audio channel. The visual equivalent of the current state of audio on browsers would be overlaying two different websites on top of each and trying to understand what you see. If that sounds stupid, then the same rules should apply to audio. More than that, you can perceive visuals side by side, window next to window, something you can’t really do with audio — the ears are just way more serial in their perception than the eyes, that can absorb much more parallel information. vision is way more superior in processing data to hear. Browsers, hence, were made by omnipotent multi-channeled uber-mensch, 10 eared aliens, not by humans.