Control speaker volume on your PC by scrolling mouse wheel
Posted on September 27, 2008 at 5:22 am
It’s nice that most laptops come with some kind of volume controls built onto the chassis near the keyboard so you don’t have to click on the sound icon in Windows (sound icon missing from TaskBar?). However, it’s still a button and it would be much nicer if you could control the sound volume on your computer using some sort of dial like on a radio, etc.
For desktop users, you always have to change the volume from within Windows or you have to reach over and change it on the speakers if you have external ones attached. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just leave your external speakers on high and change the volume on your computer using your mouse wheel!?
Volmouse is a freeware application that lets you control the sound volume on your system by simply rolling your mouse wheel up and down. It’s a pretty smart and intuitive way to control the volume if you think about it.
The cool thing about the program is how you define when you want a mouse scroll to control the sound volume. Basically, you can define a set of rules, multiple rules actually, when Volmouse should change the volume.
For example, you can configure Volmouse to control the sound volume when the ALT key is pressed down, when the left mouse button is down, when Windows Media Player is the active window, etc.
If one of the conditions is not met, your mouse wheel will behave like normal. You can also configure Volmouse so that you can control not just the Master Volume, but the CD Player volume, the Mic volume, the Wave volume, all separately. You can also configure the amount the volume should increase or decrease with each turn of the wheel in Steps.
The program allows you to really customize it to exactly the way you want, which makes it very useful. Another cool thing is that you can download and install additional plugins to the program so that you can hide active windows using a keyboard shortcut, move or resize a window by using your mouse wheel, and even open or close your CD/DVD ROM drive using the scroll wheel.
» Filed Under Free Software Downloads
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Volumouse is just perfect. It’s small, fast, and stable. I’ve been using it for years! Highly recommendable.
It’s not related to Volumouse, but I thought this would be a good place to ask: I’ve been looking for a program that can show OSD messages when you use multimedia keys (volume up, volume down, next track, previous track, play, pause, etc). Exactly the kind of controls “built onto the chassis near the keyboard” that you mentioned?
The closest one I’ve found (it has to be freeware, and work with Vista) is Sound Volume Hotkeys, but it just shows volume level, and it doesn’t even catch the volume keys of the laptop, it just works with it’s own hotkey (Win+ArrowUp,ArrowDown). Being fair, it’s pretty good at what it does. You can checkit out here: http://www.softarium.com/soundvolumehotkeys/
Do you know of any such app? BTW, great site!
I came across 3RVX, excellent freeware app that does just what I wanted. Though it only works for volume keys now, it might include othe media keys in future versions. Very nice, small footprint (under 5 MB), and skinnable. Get it here: http://matt.malensek.net/software