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Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

Not seeing an obvious way to change the volume.

A couple people have asked for this today. I think I'll be pushing a UI for this in the next couple of days :)

It's unfair to just say "Hey look. Youtube and Vimeo with billions of dollars and decades of experience between them decided to put a volume control. You should too." But personally, there should be a volume control. It is very common for multiple streams of sounds to occur in today's computing environment. I could have a Youtube video going for the visual component and some other music. Or, maybe I want to leave the speakers on at the maximum volume for notifications but not have this music completely blasting as a consequence. (This is not a far-out edge use case).

I love the minimal look and the thought that went into the design. I will definite check it out further. It will be interesting how you fit the volume control into the component which at the moment looks really well balanced and laid out. (ie. How you might improve the already-excellent UI by adding something to it)

One of my projects, listen2edm.com, has great use of the volume control on the browser.

Some of us want background noise.

May I ask why you would want to change the volume of a browser widget over, say, a browser, or your system volume? As someone that has developed a similar widget, I've never understood this request, and more often than not, users accidentally mute themselves.

I enjoy the ability to set separate audio per program without affecting my system volume.

I have many sources of audio, and their volumes vary dramatically. Unless I want to adjust the global volume every time I switch audio sources, adjusting each source once and having it stay correct makes more sense.

Think of turning up your system or browser volume for a quiet song, and then viewing a loud flash video. You might hurt your ears or disturb someone. Adjusting only your music player for songs without ruining your volume setting for some other source gives you a finer control.

I used to espouse this "finer control" argument but I've come to realize it was more typical nerd desire for hyperconfiguration than practical need. Yes, things make noises at different volumes and some are too loud and some are too quiet and they force you to jump and adjust the volume when this happens. But it's not generally predictable, so you're not going to set it just right ahead of time, and having N volume controls to go paging through to find the one that needs adjusting is a hell of a lot more difficult than just having a hardware control, always right there, that adjusts everything immediately. The number of times I've wanted to actually listen to multiple audio sources at once and carefully set their relative volumes is almost certainly in the single digits over my entire lifetime. Unless we're talking about doing mixing for an audio project, which of course we're not.

Every media player on every web page could set its volume permanently to 100% and I really would never even notice.

I think what we are thinking of is making volume control an optional parameter to enable/disable. That way we can give the embedder the ability to control that experience for the listener. Thoughts?

I don't want the embedder to control my listener experience, actually. That person knows nothing about my listening environment, and I don't want to adjust for their content. I realize this isn't such a big deal for someone that has SoundCloud playing in the background on their laptop while they do something else, but it's a total pain in the ass for anyone who works with audio professionally.

Got it. We will be implementing volume control. Look for it in the next couple of days :)

Awesome! Thanks for being so responsive, and I'll keep an eye on the project. Feel free to hit me up for feedback.

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