Windows 7 – How to Mute Sound from Other Users

audiowindowswindows 7

I recently moved from Ubuntu to Windows 7 on my home PC. It has generally been a quite pleasant experience, but of course some things are not perfect. Among them is this issue:

When for exampe my son is playing a game in his browser and I use fast user switching to get to my account, his sound is still playing. This is of course very annoying if I want to play some sound of my own.

My options seem to be:

  • Mute all sound (for all users)
  • Kill his (and all other users') applications that output sound

I would like this behaviour:

  • When I log in, all sound from other users is automatically muted

Is this possible? It sounds like the obvious behaviour, but some googling leads me to believe this is how Windows behaves.

Best Answer

I use MonitorES (http://code.google.com/p/monitores/) here at work to mute the sound whenever I lock my system. I assume it would work similarly over fast user switching but I've not tested it. It's worth a shot. It's a standalone executable that sits in the taskbar and it's free.

I know there's an option to stop media players from playing and also to mute but if it's a game it may not mute it. In Windows 7 I believe there are application based sound preferences so you could mute the browser's sound but then it would also be muted for you. If you're the one doing the switching, you could always mute his game before the switch. (Not ideal I know). But that's Microsoft's official position on it: "To resolve this behavior, either upgrade the programs, if applicable, or stop the sound-emitting program before switching users." from support.microsoft.com/kb/301681

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