I'm using Focus Booster on Windows 8 to increase productivity at work. It's a neat little app that uses the Pomodoro technique and rings an alarm every 25 mins signalling a 5 minute break. The problem is that while listening to music the alarm is frequently drowned out.
Is there a way to prioritise the volume of this program over the volume of others? Like e.g. when you call someone on skype all other sounds go much quieter. If not, is there any other app that will do this?
Unfortunately there is no product on the market (that I am aware of) that offers this ability for arbitrary software. I can however point you to the documentation of the feature you are describing, and encourage you to file a feature request with the developers of the program you mentioned (Focus Booster).
The feature you describe is known as Ducking and was new for Windows 7. MSDN offers an overview of the feature here MSDN: Default Ducking Experience. They also offer usable code samples here MSDN: DuckingMediaPlayer (Windows), please note that this feature must be implemented by the program itself so you'll need to work with the developers of the software to ask them to enable the feature.
Also note that applications can 'opt-out' of the ducking functionality (although in my experience most apps have been well behaved). Also note that some people find this feature distracting and many have disabled it (hence the low adoption rates, to be honest the only application that comes to mind as implementing this feature as desired is Skype, a Microsoft product).
