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Comment by preek | Hacker News Reader

Because most machines these days have volume control built in. You can pause the talk, though, if you want it to shut up for a moment.

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I think most people would expect for an audio player to have volume control. I can't think of another web audio player that doesn't offer it.

CTO of voicerepublic.com here.

Thank you for the feedback. We just launched VR last week and are actively improving it. I will put a volume control in the Backlog(;

I believe that should have the highest priority. It's highly unorthodox not to have it, especially for desktop users with a mouse.

I was so annoyed I didn't even listen to the audio and immediately shut down the page.

But they're completely redundant. What would you use it for?

I don't know about you, but I would use it for volume control.

A web page shouldn't act like it has exclusive ownership of system resources like audio; there may be other pages or applications running, and it's often useful to be able to control them independently.

For instance, if I have Gmail open in the background, there's no reason that adjusting the volume of whatever's in the foreground should also force me to change the volume of incoming chat notifications.

You said the same thing that I posted just now, only better. Web pages and applications should never assume that they are being used in isolation and without any switching between them.

On this note, it's annoying that OS X doesn't provide an external per-app volume control like Windows has. For example, Gmail's voice chat doesn't have a volume control; if I'm watching an iTunes video at the same time (along with the person I'm voice chatting with) and want iTunes to be louder than the chat (due to background noise from the latter), the best I can do is turn the iTunes volume up, but setting it to maximum is insufficient. With such a feature, I could just turn down the browser's volume, though I suppose it's still worthwhile to have volume controls directly embedded in video players for convenience.

It would be nice to turn down the volume on the video I'm playing now, but still have my VoIP app ring loud enough for me to notice it if I'm not paying attention.

I know it sounds weird, but sometimes I have more than one thing on my computer at a time! And some of those things have audio. So it's nice to control the volume of a specific thing, like a video, without having to change the audio for everything else on my system.

I would use the volume control to control the volume.

Bandcamp's doesn't.

It is a real pain in the ass on the Mac in my living room. The mini is hooked up to the stereo via SPDIF and for some reason that I have never bothered figuring out there is no volume control for digital out. For every other application vlc/itunes/etc I can manage the volume. I had to dig the remote out of the coffee table for this talk. Granted it would have been less of an issue without the nasty mic feedback/buzzing from the recording.

Applications tend to disagree about how loud volumes 1 to 10 should really be. So I tend to adjust youtube videos, music players etc to certain volumes using their "internal" volume control, so that I don't have to risk bleeding from my ears when I turn off the music to watch a video with a video player that sets the volume to 15 by default.

My exact thought. Some Youtube videos already amplified so I must adjust the system. Some are not so I must max Youtube and then increase system until reaching the comfort level.

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