By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Here’s a question for you – why does everyone call me on Skype when I am busy singing along to songs such as ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Loving”? This invariably means that I end up missing everyone’s phone calls because I am singing at the top of my voice, the neighbourhood cats are wailing and the deaf neighbour next door is banging on the walls telling me to shut up.

After missing a lot of Skype calls, someone not so subtly showed me Skype Muter and firmly suggested that I install it for when one of his calls comes through. It’s actually quite a neat little program and performs one single basic task. It simply stops your music when a Skype call arrives.

First though I had to install a version of Microsoft .NET which seemed to take forever, but when it was finished, the installation of Skype Muter took less than 30 seconds. You then have to go into it, click on the 2 or 3 settings and then authorize it in your Skype program (this last part is very important – I spent ages thinking the program was bust when all I had to do was approve the authorization request in Skype).

You can either tell Muter to make the music quieter or pause it completely. When the call is finished, it will start the music up again for you. It works with Winamp (my player of choice), Windows Media Player and iTunes.