Volume Mixer
Thursday 7th December, 2006 09:40 Comments: 2
Stolen shamelessly from the Windows Vista Team Blog:
Imagine you are on a plane writing a document or reading email using Microsoft Office while listening to music stored on your laptop using Windows Media Player. You are listening to your favorite tunes at high volume and suddenly you make a mistake which causes Windows to give you an error sound. On Windows XP, there wasn?t really much you could do about it since there was a single volume control for all sounds generated on the PC - whether they came from Microsoft Word or Windows Media Player. This is just not a problem on Windows Vista because we have replaced the old Volume Control with the new Volume Mixer. To bring up the Volume Mixer, click on the "speaker" icon in the right side of the tray and select "Mixer," and you will not only see the master volume control for each output device, but also a volume control for each software application - in this case each application is treated as its own input. The best part is that you can mute the sounds from each application to suit your needs.
This is a cool feature, I looked into it at home the other day, I believe I was adjusting the audio so that Windows Live Messenger wouldn't deafen me when I was playing a very quiet video. I think if I had been playing the video fullscreen, WLM would have muted itself automatically (and not show popups), as it's designed to do that so it won't interrupt presentations if you forget to sign out.
Imagine you are on a plane writing a document or reading email using Microsoft Office while listening to music stored on your laptop using Windows Media Player. You are listening to your favorite tunes at high volume and suddenly you make a mistake which causes Windows to give you an error sound. On Windows XP, there wasn?t really much you could do about it since there was a single volume control for all sounds generated on the PC - whether they came from Microsoft Word or Windows Media Player. This is just not a problem on Windows Vista because we have replaced the old Volume Control with the new Volume Mixer. To bring up the Volume Mixer, click on the "speaker" icon in the right side of the tray and select "Mixer," and you will not only see the master volume control for each output device, but also a volume control for each software application - in this case each application is treated as its own input. The best part is that you can mute the sounds from each application to suit your needs.
This is a cool feature, I looked into it at home the other day, I believe I was adjusting the audio so that Windows Live Messenger wouldn't deafen me when I was playing a very quiet video. I think if I had been playing the video fullscreen, WLM would have muted itself automatically (and not show popups), as it's designed to do that so it won't interrupt presentations if you forget to sign out.
Fab - Thursday 7th December, 2006 11:47 Now that is cool. I was watching prison break the other night and turned on ICQ forgetting to turn the sound down. The resulting ship horn blast that is the icq startup sound probably confused the seagulls in the park half a mile away!
Prison Break's cool, but the Complete Season 1 DVD is a little bit expensive for my liking: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000FS9FW6/