I was experimenting with automated music playback through a web automation tool and created a script that controls audio playback. The problem is that I closed my Python program without properly shutting down the background browser instance, and now there’s music playing continuously from somewhere on my system.
I can hear the audio but I can’t see any visible browser windows open. The browser is running in background mode and I need to find a way to locate this hidden process and stop it completely. Is there a way to identify and kill these background browser processes that are still running?
I’ve hit this same issue with Selenium scripts. Just use command line - it’s way faster than clicking around in task manager. On Windows, run tasklist | findstr chrome or tasklist | findstr firefox to see all browser processes and their PIDs. Then kill them with taskkill /PID [process_id] /F. Mac/Linux users can do ps aux | grep chrome then kill -9 [process_id]. Selenium often spawns multiple browser processes, so you’ll probably need to kill several. Command line beats the GUI because you can see exactly what’s eating your resources and target the right process.
To resolve the issue of background audio playback, first access the audio mixer on your system. For Windows users, right-click the volume icon and select “Open Volume Mixer”. This will allow you to identify which applications are currently producing sound, helping you locate the problematic browser. If the audio mixer does not provide clarity, proceed to the Task Manager to investigate any running browser processes such as chrome.exe or firefox.exe. Be sure to check for any WebDriver processes like chromedriver.exe as well, since they may keep browsers running in the background. In the future, remember to include driver.quit() in your automation scripts to safely terminate processes.
check ur browser settings for “continue running background apps when closed” - chrome’s notorious for this. go to chrome://settings/system and turn it off. if the processes won’t quit, restart ur system. they sometimes get stuck and won’t die otherwise.