Audio Ducking

Submitted by Tristan on Wednesday, June 11, 2014.
Forum
macOS & Mac Apps

Hi all,
I've switched over to my MacBook as my primary laptop. I doubt this is possible, but here goes.

Often times I have to use a Virtual Machine of Windows to control a server via SSH, access a few MUDs I'm an admin on, or use Microsoft Office products. First of all, I understand SSH Is possible via terminal. I prefer not to use the Mac for this, as my SSH keys are stored in the PuTTY format and it would be something of a task to convert them to regular Unix keys.
While I'm using Windows, I enjoy listening to podcasts or music while I work. I'm curious as to if there's a tweak out there, or an AppleScript that would let me duck the audio playing on OS X in concurrency with Windows. As an example, I would like my Mac audio to duck out while JAWS or NVDA is speaking. Has anyone experimented at all with this? It may be a moot point, as usually I have VO off while virtualized.

Thanks in advance

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Comments

Submitted by dvdmth on Wednesday, June 11, 2014

I don't use Windows myself, but I suspect that a VoiceOver preference would not affect audio generated by a Windows screen reader, as the two are independent of one another. The original poster wants the Mac audio to duck when using a Windows screen reader, like what VoiceOver is capable of natively.

Submitted by DPinWI on Wednesday, June 11, 2014

If it is impossible to do this inside the box. There are cheap, small external audio compressors that can do thinks like ducking by using side chain processing. I'm not sure if this is an acceptable solution for you, but it would work.