SmartSilencer

Smart Silencer

The game goes quiet, by itself, while something else has your ears.

Put on Spotify and Valheim's sound fades out. Pause it and the game fades back in. Same when a YouTube video starts in your browser, and same when you tab out to another window. Nothing is paused and nothing else changes: the world keeps running, your volume settings stay as they were, and the moment you are back to it the sound is too.

What you get

Three triggers, each with its own switch, all on by default:

• Music Playing. A music player is making sound: Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, MusicBee, foobar2000, Winamp, AIMP, TIDAL, Deezer, Amazon Music and a few more, in an editable list.
• Video Playing. A video player is making sound: any browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, ...), VLC, mpv, MPC, PotPlayer, Netflix, Plex, Kodi and the Windows video apps. Browsers are in this list because a browser is how most people watch anything.
• Game Not Focused. Another window is in front.

And a fourth, off by default:

• Other Apps Playing. Any other program is making sound, apart from an ignored list (Discord, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Steam, Windows itself). Off so a voice call or a notification does not silence the game.

Two more, also off by default:

• Game Paused. The game is paused: the ESC menu in single player, or a pause granted by PauseMyServer on a server. The ESC menu on a server does not pause, so it does not count.
• Main Menu. You are on the main menu, before a world is loaded and after leaving one.

While any trigger holds, the game's sound fades down to Quiet Volume (silent by default) over a short fade, and fades back up when none does. A short top-left message says which program it went quiet for, and when the sound came back.

Music and video are detected the same way the Windows volume mixer shows a moving level bar next to each program: Smart Silencer reads those per-app level meters a few times a second. So it knows the difference between Spotify being open and Spotify actually playing, and it needs no plug-in, account or browser extension. It does not know what a browser is playing, only that it is playing something.

Switching it on and off

• In the config, with a mod manager's config editor or the in-game Configuration Manager (F1). Every setting takes effect immediately; no restart.
• A hotkey (Toggle Key) flips the master switch while playing. It is empty by default, since every plain key already does something in Valheim; a combination such as LeftControl + F9 is a safe pick.
• The console (F5): silencer shows the state, silencer on and silencer off flip the master switch, silencer music off (or video, other, focus, paused, menu) flips one trigger, and silencer apps lists every program that has an audio session right now, with its level and how Smart Silencer classifies it. That last one is how to find the name to put in a list when something is not detected, or is detected and should not be.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/DeathMonger.SmartSilencer.cfg:

| Setting | Default | What it does | | --- | --- | --- | | Mod Enabled | true | Master switch, and what the hotkey flips. | | Toggle Key | (none) | Hotkey for the master switch. | | Show Messages | false | Top-left messages on going quiet and coming back. Handy for confirming it works. The hotkey's on/off confirmation always shows. | | Log Transitions | false | Also write those transitions to the BepInEx log. Handy for confirming it works, noise afterwards. | | Quiet Volume | 0 | The game's volume while silenced, 0 to 1. 0.2 keeps it faintly there under the music. | | Fade Out Seconds | 0.4 | How long the sound takes to go down. | | Fade In Seconds | 0.8 | How long it takes to come back. | | Music Playing | true | Trigger on programs in the Music Apps list. | | Video Playing | true | Trigger on programs in the Video Apps list. | | Other Apps Playing | false | Trigger on any other program not in Ignored Apps. | | Game Not Focused | true | Trigger when another window is in front. | | Game Paused | false | Trigger while the game is paused. | | Main Menu | false | Trigger on the main menu. | | Music Apps, Video Apps, Ignored Apps | see above | Program names without .exe, comma separated, case does not matter. Ignored wins over the other two. | | Poll Interval Seconds | 0.25 | How often the level meters are read. | | Sound Threshold | 0.005 | The meter reading (0 to 1) that counts as sound. Music at any listenable volume is far above it. | | Sound Delay Seconds | 0.3 | How long a program must have been making sound before the game goes quiet. | | Silence Grace Seconds | 2 | How long everything must have been silent before the sound comes back. Covers the gap between songs and a video buffering. | | Quiet Missing Location Music | true | Stop the game asking for location music it does not have. See below. |

The log line it quiets

A music volume names the track it wants, and names it again every tick you stand inside it. When that track is not loaded, the game writes Location music missing: <name> each time — thousands of lines for standing in one room.

Valheim ships at least one: the frost cave sanctum asks for frostcaves, and no track of that name exists, nor any frost cave music anywhere in the game's audio. So a name the game cannot play is dropped before it is set. Nothing that could have played is silenced, because the only names dropped are the ones whose lookup can only fail — and if a future Valheim ships the missing track, the name is found and this stops doing anything. Turn Quiet Missing Location Music off to leave the game as it ships.

Notes