Mute other sounds - MS Teams

[alexsmith2709]

I seem to have the opposite problem from the rest of the internet. I would like Teams to be able to mute/severely reduce the volume of my music when i receive/make a call (I use Business Voice/Teams Phone or whatever they call it these days) but i cant seem to do it.
I have allowed "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device", with and without "Audio Enhancements" enabled and have set the setting to "Reduce the volume of other sounds by 80%" (and tried "Mute all other sounds") in the communications tab of the sound settings. I guess windows doesnt detect a Teams call as a call.
There must be a setting to enable this as all over the internet are people asking how to stop their music muting. When i have music playing i can barely hear the ring tone of Teams and the music doesnt mute even after the call is answered.

I am using Windows 11, i tried with and without a headset and i also use external speakers. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[Sky-Knight]

That setting is hokey... I turn it off because it causes me more grief than it's worth.

As for the rest I use Windows's Volume mixer, I turn everything down to 20-30% except Teams. Then I turn up the volume on my head phones so I can hear everything. It's great! Until I forget to disable Teams and blow my eardrums out.

But the Communications Tab settings are supposed to work. Was office installed before you upgraded to Win11? I've had some very strange problems with Teams on machines like that recently. So you might try uninstalling Teams, Teams System Wide Installer, and M365 apps, rebooting then reinstalling M365. It will put Teams back. The only odd bit is remembering you have to reboot / logout and back in again after it's done because the Teams System Wide installer only triggers on login. Worse it can take 2-3 min before the purple icon shows up. EVEN WORSE there is a personal version of Teams in Win11 that's really hard to get rid of that won't accept business logins.

This is a very deep well.

 

[alexsmith2709]

This laptop came with Windows 11. I dont always have my headset on, as its not wireless and im not always sat at my computer, Teams is set to use the headset and also ring through the external speakers.

 

[britechguy]

I offer the following only because it's so common on screen readers, and if it's not a part of Teams someone should probably put in feedback asking for it.

Screen readers, including Narrator, all have a feature called "audio ducking," such that you can force all other background audio to be reduced by some percentage when the screen reader is actually speaking, and it pops right back up as soon as the speech stops.

It sounds like you want something like audio ducking in Teams, and that would be a useful feature. Narrator has it, if I'm recalling correctly, so someone at Microsoft should be familiar with the term "audio ducking" if you use it.

 

[alexsmith2709]

I offer the following only because it's so common on screen readers, and if it's not a part of Teams someone should probably put in feedback asking for it.

Screen readers, including Narrator, all have a feature called "audio ducking," such that you can force all other background audio to be reduced by some percentage when the screen reader is actually speaking, and it pops right back up as soon as the speech stops.

It sounds like you want something like audio ducking in Teams, and that would be a useful feature. Narrator has it, if I'm recalling correctly, so someone at Microsoft should be familiar with the term "audio ducking" if you use it.

Yes, thats what the setting in Control Panel > Sound > Communications is meant to do but its not working.
the full wording of that setting is:
"Windows can automatically adjust the volume of different sounds when you are using your PC to place or receive telephone calls"
with the options being to completely mute, reduce by 80%, reduce by 50% or do nothing. I dont think it worked on my old windows 10 laptop so its probably Teams and Windows not communicating with each other that its a "phone" call.

 

[britechguy]

"Windows can automatically adjust the volume of different sounds when you are using your PC to place or receive telephone calls"
with the options being to completely mute, reduce by 80%, reduce by 50% or do nothing. I dont think it worked on my old windows 10 laptop so its probably Teams and Windows not communicating with each other that its a "phone" call.

And I think you've hit the nail on the head. I also think that audio ducking needs to be "settable" in specific programs, as there are occasions where you would want different levels of ducking to whatever you may have as the default for "phone calls."

I'm not at all clear what Windows would consider to be a "phone call." It could be limited to what comes through the Your Phone app, for all I know. There are so many different times, Teams being one example, where the functional equivalent of a phone call can occur that it should be possible for the programs where that's the case to set override audio ducking in their own settings that are passed to Windows to honor "on demand."

And that's precisely what is done, now, in screen readers. It's not a new idea, nor one that requires huge effort to implement. The same feature that already exists elsewhere needs to be added to Teams.

 

[alexsmith2709]

Whats most confusing about this is that when i search for this problem i only find issues where "audio ducking" is occuring in Teams and people want to stop it. If i do the opposite of those instructions (i.e leave everything as default) i dont have the same result.
It would be nice to set it per app, it would make things easier

 

[Sky-Knight]

That's because that feature has been buggy since day one. I've disabled it on just about every system I work on.

 

[alexsmith2709]

I've done something similar to you @Sky-Knight. Because i use external speakers, i've turned the volume up high on the external speakers and only use them for the teams secondary ringer, headset is used for calls and the laptop speakers are for music and other system sounds and is set to a lower volume.
On my tests i cant hear the music coming through the headset mic so i think this might be my new setup if nothing else will work

 

[britechguy]

Another tip that comes from the screen reader world is that it's often easier to "separate out audio" by getting a cheap USB sound card and channeling certain things through it, while others go through your built-in one.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Another tip that comes from the screen reader world is that it's often easier to "separate out audio" by getting a cheap USB sound card and channeling certain things through it, while others go through your built-in one.

I despise this solution, but yeah it's often necessary.