Computer trivia

Suppose you are in a conference and browse to a site to get some information. How do you feel if the site suddenly starts playing some song or starts explaining about their products. Embarrassed?

With the advent of Flash, it has become pretty common to include flash in the webpages as it loads much faster. Using flash is certainly welcome, but certain websites misbehave by including audio which plays without user consent. This is done with the sole aim of getting he users attention. But this causes frustration and sometimes embarrasses us. I was wondering if there is any solution to disable the sounds from the flash websites (Of course, not the obvious solution of muting the system volume, which may not always be possible).

I searched over the Internet and found many softwarez which does this. However there is a very easy solution to this. The idea is, browsers use a dynamic link library named “msacm32.dll” to get the sound drivers. So if we prevent the browser from doing this, it will not play any sounds. The browser first searches for this file in its home directory and then in the windows root directory.

So the solution is, create an empty text file, rename it as msacm32.dll and place it in the home directory of the browser.  So the browser tries to get the directory information from this dummy and obviously fails. As it has already found the file in its home directory, it will not again search for it in the windows directory and thus will not find the original file. In case you want your browser to play the sounds again, just remove the file we created above or rename it to something else.

As far as I know, this solution will not cause any problems.

Note:

Home Directory for IE: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer

Home Directory for Firefox: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox

These may differ in your machine

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