I’ve been building two big ass sites for the past few months that both have auto-play elements on many of their pages. I work best when I can put the headphones on, but when iTunes is your main music source, listening to music isn’t very pleasant when you have audio that starts up every time you re-load a page. During the last phases of front end layout, I often have four or five browser windows displaying content. Multiple instances of the same audio playing at different intervals is horribly annoying, even if it’s a song you still enjoy after the 9000th time you’ve heard it.

My professional recommendation as a web developer is to not auto play media on your page. It’s annoying, it can be jarring late at night, and it can get you in trouble at work. These seem like things you generally wouldn’t want to do to the people supporting your site/business. But the customer is always right, and I aim to please.

Enter Audio Hijack Pro. I’ve been using Audio Hijack to some degree for years to capture audio from various applications on my computer, but until recently, it never occurred to me to use it for controlling live audio—or more accurately, muting the audio of a specific application!

Now that I can mute Firefox, Safari, and my entire virtual Windows machine, iTunes can have free reign of my system without interruption. I only wish I thought of doing this years ago.