[MPlayer-users] A Mysterious Mute Question

[Martin McCormick]

This is not a bug or any kind of complaint but sort of what
computer folks call an Easter Egg.

I've been using mplayer for an extremely long time to be asking a
novice question like this but my curiosity is now peaked after
spending much time scratching my head trying to solve a problem
that made no sense.

	I had made some changes in my sound setup last week and
suddenly, mplayer was perpetually silent when I played any sound
files such as mp3 or wav.  mplayer appeared to be playing the
recordings but nothing was coming out of the speakers, headphones
or even a usb audio device I plugged in to the system having the
problem.  Other sounds were all there like they should be but no
mplayer.

	I am using debian bullseye Linux and I finally figured
out what happened, more by accident than intellect.

	I started a long .wav sound file playing with mplayer and
began trying various actions to get the sound that should be
there.

	I could press the Space Bar which is frequently used to
toggle sound on and off and nothing happened.  I then had an
inspiration, Let's try the lower-case m as that is a mute button,
also.

	I pressed it and mplayer printed the message that showed
Mute is enabled.  Okay so now let's disable Mute.  I pressed m
again and at the same instant it printed that muting was
disabled, the program audio began pouring out like it should.

	What I discovered is that somewhere, the state of the
mute which comes from pressing m is saved.  If you press q while
the audio was muted from your press of m, mplayer stays muted if
you restart it again.

	I looked for any file in ~/.mplayer with a brand new time
stamp with ls -at which should even show hidden files but the
only updated stamp was .. which was my current directory of ~/.mplayer.

	I have duplicated this behavior several times and ran
strace to try to see what file got written to but didn't find
anything.

	The stuck muted state survived a couple of system reboots
over the last two days but as soon as I pressed m twice while
mplayer was playing, everything was fine.  I think the original
problem came from pressing m by mistake, not realizing I did that
and closing the file.

	Since discovering this Easter Egg, I have deliberately
pressed m while mplayer was playing, exited mplayer back to the
shell prompt, and then restarted mplayer which stayed muted even
if the file played was different than the one that I was playing
when I deliberately pressed m.

	The question, then, is how does mplayer remember that it
was last muted?

	If you use the Space Bar to mute and exit mplayer, it
forgets the muted condition and resumes playing as one would
expect.

	Thanks for such a great and versatile program.

Martin McCormick