Application Driven Audio Volume Mixer in Windows 7

6

image thumb1 - Application Driven Audio Volume Mixer in Windows 7

Yes, you see it right. It’s the new Volume Mixer in Windows 7, which lists all applications that are currently running and producing the audio.

At the time I took above screenshot, I have Yahoo! Music running in Firefox, RadioIO in Google Chrome, and 3 main media players all running at the same time. From the picture, you can see I have audio streaming on both Google Chrome and Windows Media Player with the latter disabled.

Is it useful? Well, sometime you do find this comes in handy. Here is one example. When you are in one application, you suddenly hear music coming out from your speaker without any clue where it comes from. Now, you can simply open this Volume Mixer and find out which application is current producing the audio.

6 COMMENTS

  1. This is very useful, unfortunatly, Windows doesn’t remeber the settings for a specific application 🙁 (at least when using Steam voice communication)

  2. how to delete/dissable this crappy mixer ? i like e-mu's 0404 patchmix dsp – would be cool to route all audio trought patchmix

    mystuff:
    E-MU 0404 pci + Krell KAV-300i + Dynaudio Audience 82

  3. The new Mixer is useful when you have multiple application running sounds at once, so you can individually control what you want to hear.

    For certain people, like myself, there is a downside for it. ASIO driver, for instance, especially when it’s using an on-board audio, reports outputs as “unavailable” when there is at least one application that used audio resources, even if it’s just once, like in the case of instant messengers. The messengers remain in the mixer, thus resulting in ASIO driver not working. The only way around this is to completely shut down the troubling application, and restarting it again. That way it removes itself from the mixer.

    It would be very helpful if Windows would remove the application from the audio poll (ie. the mixer) once it stopped using the audio driver/resource for a certain amount of time; or even if we could do it manually.

  4. Hello
    Could any one tell me if it possible to add a minimize button to the windows volume mixer in windows 7, I use it a lot so it would be better than just closing it every time.

    • I don’t think you can minimize the mixer in Windows 7. However, since you are using it a lot, you may try pinging it onto the taskbar instead, which might be working better for you.

      Cheers.

  5. Hi,
    I see in the screenshot after each text there is a “□” character. I have them too, on 2 pc’s and I can’t get rid of them. Don’t know what causes them but it is abnormal. Do you have an idea how to get rid of them?

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here