Arch Linux

solipsists

Member

Registered: 2017-02-27

Posts: 2

Pause Music (Spotify, Amarok) while watching Video (YouTube) on Chrome

Hi everyone,

is there a possibility to pause spotify or amarok while playing YouTube, SoundCloud or similar streams?
Its annoying to always pause and resume music on spotify or amarok  for watching a youtube video.

How do you guys solve this problem?

I found out this module of pulseaudio is responsible for corking apps:

module-role-cork

What do I need to do to toggle music or video for some kind of "exclusive usage" of pulseaudio?

System:
-Arch_x64
-KDE Plasma5
-pulseaudio
Packages:
-chromium (Youtube, Twitch, soundcloud)
-spotify
-vlc

whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Re: Pause Music (Spotify, Amarok) while watching Video (YouTube) on Chrome

To get started, basically, you could load the module (if it isn't already):

pactl load-module module-role-cork

Start chromium with the priority of a "phone":

PULSE_PROP='media.role=phone' chromium

Also, you start the application you want to be muted with the "music" role (some applications have this role already) - it will then be muted whenever chromium has a pulseaudio stream open. Sadly, chromium tends to keep those streams open for a while even if no audio is playing (until all pages that have media playing audio are closed?), so this solution might be inadequate for your purposes.

Unless you enjoy searching trough all of your tabs every time your music stops playing "for like no reason"...

You're probably better off binding a pause command for your music application to a key combination or a spare mouse button (p.E.: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Spotify ). I'd imagine binding "pause" and "skip" to those useless horizontal scroll buttons most good mice have nowadays could work well for you.