Quiet!
Available in the Mac App Store
Quiet! is an application for OS X that allows you to remotely mute and unmute your audio. It does this by opening a small http server on port 3366. You can then “GET” /mute or /unmute. Using this method it is extremely simple to mute your mac using only a web browser. You can tie in cron jobs to mute your mac, write small scripts on other devices, or create bookmarks on your web enabled phone. Because the method of calling for a mute or unmute is simple, there are several possibilities for muting and unmuteing.
Examples
I have listed a few common examples that I and others I know use. Hopefully this will allow you to create your own solution. For more examples and some sample applications and scripts head over to the Quiet! Wiki. Below is just a small sample of what you can do.
Browser Based muting:
This is one of the easiest ways to mute your mac remotely with Quiet!. Just point any web browser to the IP of your mac, port 3366. For example, if your ip address is 192.168.1.100 then you can use any browser on your home network to mute your mac by browsing to “http://192.168.1.100:3366/mute”. You can unmute your mac by browsing to “http://192.168.1.100:3366/unmute”
Bookmark Based Muting:
This is one of my favorites. Again very simple and just like browser based muting above. However this time you create bookmarks to the address “http://192.168.1.100:3366/mute” and “http://192.168.1.100:3366/unmute” and put them at an easy location. Some examples that I personally use are; my iPad Home Screen, my G1 home Screen (that I use as a remote for a mythtv setup), and the desktop of my “upstairs laptop”. Basically anything that can make a bookmark can be used to mute your mac remotely. A very handy feature when all you want to do is watch Netflix on your iPad but you left your Pandora playing on your Mac.
Script Based Muting:
Another very popular method is to mute your mac using shell scripts. This will work from your local mac as well but works much better from a remote machine. Basically you just go to the Quiet! address using either curl or wget. This allows you to script almost anything to automatically and remotely mute your mac. The command line that I use the most is wget -q “http://192.168.1.100:3366/unmute” -o /dev/null. The -q tells wget to be quiet and the -o tells wget where to save the file. In this case were not saving it anywhere.
App based muting
This is by far my favorite method. For Android phones I have created a small application that calls Quiet! when ever you answer the phone. An iPhone version is in active development and will be released soon.
More Possibilities
Anything that can make a http GET request can interface with Quiet!. The possibilities are endless. I personally use it in a few more places, like a mythtv script to mute my mac when I start watching a movie. If you have any ideas that you would like to share email me at support@coteyr.net and I will get them listed on the site.
Support
The best way to get support is to first check out the wik. Please take the time to check out the FAQ section and the Pending Features section first. If there is a problem chances are other people are having it too, and your question can be answered much faster there. If all else fails or you just really need a hand take a look at the support page for more information.
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