Sometimes I mute the volume and forget a song or internet radio station is playing. I need a visual cue to tell me the song is playing in the background while in mute.
Is there an indicator for audio/sound that is playing?
In case you use Gnome Shell, there is this extension that might do what you want.
The version 6 of that extension should provide a volume control per application, but it has not been released (as of today).
Here is another method I found using Unity: Install the indicator-sysmonitor
indicator and have it run a script that checks the sound.
I haven't written a script yet, but here is how to do it if you use pulseaudio
: https://superuser.com/questions/393448/detecting-audio-playing-in-a-bash-script
Run the custom script with indicator-sysmonitor
: http://www.tuxgarage.com/2011/10/system-monitor-multiload-appindicators.html (second half of the article)