Volume² - advanced Windows volume control

You're on the sofa, the film is too quiet, and the PC is across the room. This guide turns your phone into a remote for the PC's volume, over your home Wi-Fi, with no app to install on the phone.

You plug in headphones and the next sound is far too loud. Or the PC blasts a notification at full volume late at night. This guide sets the volume automatically: when you switch to headphones, at a set time, when you lock the PC or when i…

Press a volume key on Windows and a black box pops up in the corner of the screen, and sometimes it covers what you're looking at. This guide explains how to hide the Windows volume popup, and how to replace it with an indicator you ca…

"You're on mute." "No, you're on mute." Every calling app has its own mute button in a different place, and none of them work when the app is hidden behind other windows. This guide sets up one key that mutes yo…

Laptops have brightness keys. Desktop monitors usually don't: you reach behind the screen and dig through the monitor's own menu with its little buttons. This guide shows how to change the brightness of an external monitor from the…

Every Volume² on-screen display skin is a folder of PNG images and one Skin.xml file. There's no special editor: you draw the pictures in any image editor, describe where they go in the XML, and restart Volume². This guide builds a rea…

Volume², EarTrumpet and Volumouse all improve on the Windows volume control, and all three are free. They solve different problems, though. This is an honest side-by-side, written by the author of one of them, so we've stuck to what ea…

A game that's too loud next to a quiet voice chat, a browser tab blaring over your music: Windows can give each program its own volume, but only through a settings window. This guide covers the built-in way first, then how to do it fro…

The fastest way to change the volume on a PC is the mouse wheel your hand is already on. Windows only half supports it, though. This guide shows what Windows can do by itself and how to make the wheel control the volume from almost anywher…