Tab Ducker
Automatically lowers selected background tabs while another tab is actually producing sound, then restores them when that sound stops.
How to use it
- Open the Tab Ducker toolbar popup.
- Arm the music or background-audio tabs you want lowered.
- Set the ducked volume; the default is 15%.
- Optionally adjust the sound threshold to ignore very quiet audio.
- When another unarmed tab produces sound, armed tabs duck automatically.
What the indicators mean
A ducked tab temporarily uses the Tab Ducker icon as its favicon, making the active ducking state easy to spot in the tab bar.
Audio detection
Tab Ducker uses Opera/Chromium tab-audio state and, where the page permits it, local waveform sampling of normal audio and video elements. The sound threshold helps avoid ducking for silent or effectively silent playback. Some protected cross-origin media or Web Audio content cannot expose a precise waveform to a content script; in those cases the extension falls back to the browser's audible state.
Troubleshooting
- If an already-open tab is not detected after installing or updating, refresh that tab once.
- Browser-internal pages such as
opera://pages cannot be controlled by normal web content scripts. - If a site behaves differently from ordinary HTML audio/video, Tab Ducker may rely on Opera's audible-state fallback.
Privacy
All detection and ducking happens locally in your browser. Tab Ducker does not send browsing data, audio, settings, or analytics to an external server.