Audio Killer is a favelet/bookmarklet which terminates the playing of audio files on a web page. This is particularly useful when you encounter a web page that automatically plays an annoying audio file that the web page author provides no means of having you terminate.

Note that testing this favelet out on this web page will have no effect. We've supplied links you can test it out on at the bottom of the page.

Browser Compatibility

• Internet Explorer 5.0+
• Netscape 6.0+
• Mozilla 1.0+

• Stop sounds created by frames.
• Stop sounds generated by web programming environments such as Java™ or Flash.

Audio Killer doesn't discriminate between multimedia files you don't want played and multimedia files you do want played. It effectively removes the browser's capacity to play any multimedia file on the page that Audio Killer is executed on. If you are dissatisfied with the way the web page is functioning after executing Audio Killer, simply reload the page. This will reverse the effects of Audio Killer.

After testing Audio Killer and looking at its source code, you might wonder how we are able to clobber audio files loaded with the <bgsound> tag without referencing any <bgsound> elements. It turns out that clobbering audio files is a side-effect of executing favelets. Although our tests were not exhaustive, we were able to clobber not only audio files loaded from <bgsound> tags, but audio files loaded from <embed> tags, with exception to Midi files. You can test this out by simply typing the following URL into your browser when you encounter a sound file that is playing on a web page that was loaded via a <bgsound> tag:

• BigNoseBird.com : On this page, BigNoseBird.com autoloads an audio file. A loading routine written in JavaScript dynamically loads the audio file with an <embed> tag if you're using IE or a <bgsound> tag if you're using Netscape. While this is good for our testing purposes, what they are doing, and propose other people do is completely unnecessary because IE and Netscape both support the <bgsound> tag. According to Microsoft's documentation they've been supporting the <bgsound> tag since version 3.
• Bellsnwhistles.com: : This page autoloads sound effects and music. Bellsnwhistles.com also offers a plethora of blinking stuff, animated status bar text gizmos, and other irritating goodies.
• Webreference : This is a <bgsound> tag demo page which autoloads an audio file. It won't work with Netscape as Netscape doesn't support the <bgsound> tag. What's interesting about this demo is that it exposes a defect in Audio Killer. After using Audio Killer to terminate the audio file, wait 10 to 30 seconds. You'll get a surprise. At least it surprised us. You can view their source code to see why this surprise occurred. (For those of you who are too lazy to run the experiment, the surprise is that another sound plays. Using JavaScript, they programmed a sounds to play in an alternating pattern every 30 seconds.) We are reluctant to fix this problem by making Audio Killer intrusive like our Script Killer Favelet, which actually rewrites the page, because of the potential side-effects. There might be a simpler solution.