As was the basis of this question, I have no such plugin in my Audacious on KDE (but it was there on XFCE):
You asked for something to ONLY mute audacious while other media keeps playing right? Btw. Tell me something. What’s the point of Muting something if it continues to play in the background?
So yeah, unless you use one of the proposed answers, you lost your keys. Switch to gtk.
It’s frustrating to constantly repeat myself.
The purpose of muting something that keeps playing in the background would be that it’s an Internet stream and not a local file. Pausing and unpausing a live audio stream has wonky/unreliable behaviour.
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or use Arch, btw or FreeBSD… 
Ok, seriously. I think @dzon 's hint to use audatool together with kde’s shortcut as workaround is pretty useful.
But it doesn’t look right in GTK mode, though… How come the Audacious-native hotkeys are only available for that display mode?
As @dzon replied earlier, (at least on FreeBSD) there was a missing dependency when building the package.
Either compile it yourself with the missing library or have a look on the official audacious download section, if and how you get the latest packages for your distro/release?
I’m glad this isn’t about smplayer. That one supports every known codec, has about ten styles by default, a couple of icon sets, configurable bars, does stream, radio, tv, screenshots, youtube, god knows how many audio/video settings, mouse wheel, mouse settings, around 100 keyboard settings ( would have to count) and of ALL things…a mute. Imagine that, a functioning mute!
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hehe, yes… Ok, smplayer falls short on chip, tracker and oldschool formats compared to audacious but I really like it.
And thanks I had a big laugh at the second screenshot with the hotkey configuration, I knew it had one, but wasn’t aware of the possibilities … 
Oldschool formats? Would have to be Sumerian cuneiform cause I’ve been using that thing well over a decade ( tempus fugit) and never encountered a prob really. Maybe it doesn’t handle La Roche Cotard cave codecs, quite possible. But yeah, countless options it has. The force is strong within this one. O, my bad. Forgot the chromecast thingie.
I agree, for the gazillions of streaming formats smplayer( or rather mplayer/mpv) is a good choice.
I was more thinking about e.g. having a real good modplayer, sid, ahx, adlib or sndh. Music file formats from the 80ies and 90ies 8bit/16bit home computer/console area… You know, that kind of oldschool. ;-)The plugin system of audacious is/was a good way having/adding that support. But I think we digress, now…
btw… ymmd, thanks!
