Is there a way to disable sound in one program?
If you click on the sound icon in the top bar (at least in 12.04) and go to Sound Settings > Applications, then you can adjust the sound for each application individually. You can see in the screenshot that I have two programs open at the same time. The top one is Firefox playing a YouTube video and I was able to mute it separately.
A downside of this method is that not all applications appear there. As far as I know, it's only for those which use ALSA. Just give it a try, it works fine for me with some programs.
Hope this helps.
In Ubuntu 20.10 you can do the following:
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Click the top right hand corner of the screen, where the battery, sound and wifi icons are located.
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Click on Settings
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When the Popup menu comes up, navigate down to the Sound tab on the left hand side of the the Settings menu.
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Looking under Volume Levels You can see a list of open windows and the main system sound. Feel free adjust them as you need.