Back in 8.2 the ability to mute sound files by name and replacing game sounds with custom sounds on disk was removed, likely because filenames for sound files are no longer used by the game by their filenames and as such those aren’t exposed/shipped anymore.
Muting was (and to a smaller extent, still is) being used to mute certain sounds that people find uncomfortable/annoying or might want to ignore for accessibility reasons e.g. for those getting easily overwhelmed by certain sounds. Sounds replacements were used for replacing sounds for similar reasons, but also let people customize their sounds to bring back older spell/weapon/gun sounds that were changed at some point.
The MuteSoundFile API was introduced the same patch (8.2) to at least bring the ability to mute sounds back, but you’re only able to do this by the sounds FileDataID which is not available/searchable anywhere in-game and you are forced to use external tools/sites making it effectively useless unless you figure out which exact FileDataID to mute through these external tools.
This was made worse in the next patch (8.3) with the removal of the SoundKitName database file which at least exposed some names for sounds, making them even harder to find. People have been using my site to look up which sounds to mute, but that’s no longer going to be updated after 10.0 and is missing a lot of names post-8.2. Wowhead also has a searchable sound database, but even that is hard to search through as Wowhead was also using SoundKitName or their own naming to name these files.
I’m not getting into the topic of bringing back filenames and such as I already made a separate topic about that a while ago, but it’d be nice to somehow improve the ability to find files to be able to know which to mute and maybe even bringing back the ability to replace sounds on disk similar to how it used to work, or how replacing files in interface/ still works today.
There’s multiple ways to go about finding sounds to mute easier again like maybe bringing back SoundKitName, being able to turn on sound logging for a bit so all played sounds go to some log file/chat log (maybe with attached NPC VO text, if available) or something along the lines of that.
As for replacing sounds, maybe allowing people to just put things in _retail_/Sound/<filedataid>.ogg would be a good enough fix for that, provided those IDs are easier to find.
This isn’t a huge gamebreaking issue or anything, but I wanted to make note of it as it would just be a good QoL thing to have back, both for accessibility and customizability reasons. One recent example I can think of is the interact cue sound for example (when it is fixed), it’d be pretty useful and neat to be able to modify/customize that sound.