IDEA: Volume Lock Program

[Captain_Crunch]

I'd like to see a program that locks the volume levels and don't allow other programs to change them. I'm currently in a Nursing Home, and sometimes have games that change the sound levels to max so when they run, they tend to blast all the windows off the place and then I have to scramble to quit the game and restore the "quiet" settings. a neat prog, like this would allow me to play games with sound with little risk of annoying everyone.

[skwire]

Perhaps Volume Locker might be worth your money?  $14.95

[Captain_Crunch]

I've tried that, and it doesn't seem to work so well. There are a few games that change the wave sound level. And Volume Locker doesn't seem to protect the wave volume.

[skwire]

I've tried that, and it doesn't seem to work so well. There are a few games that change the wave sound level. And Volume Locker doesn't seem to protect the wave volume.

-Captain_Crunch (May 16, 2011, 08:34 AM)

Sorry to hear that.  Which OS are you using?  It wouldn't take much to write an app that would poll the master and wave values every second or so and reset them if they're changed from the original value.  I realise this is a brutish way of doing things but it should work fine.

[Captain_Crunch]

Windows XP/SP 3

[skwire]

Try this proof-of-concept: LockVolume

Simply run it and it will check your master and wave volume every 0.5 seconds.  Any changes to them and they'll be reset to the values that they were at when you started the application.  Use the tray menu to exit the app.  More configurability could be added but, again, this is just a proof-of-concept.

[Captain_Crunch]

Thanks! It has worked well so far.

[skwire]

Great.  Thanks for the feedback.

[superboyac]

I'm interested in this as well.  I used to use IndieVolume years ago, but it hardly ever worked without crashing, so I always ended up removing it after a couple of days.  It seriously worked maybe 10% of the time without crashing applications at best.

I would love to find some kind of volume wrangler for Windows.  It's great that Windows 7 now has individual application level volume control.  But I still have issues.  At any given master volume, a flash thing online will be at least 10x louder than anything else on my computer.  Even if I turn up to max the volume control in a music player or video player, it will never be as loud as a flash thing on the web at half volume.  I just don't understand how to control volume on Windows.  I don't get it.

It would be great to have a program that can anaylze how loud something is after all the processing is finished.  Every program has their own individual volume control, but I don't care about that.  I just want to know how loud it is at the end of it all...after the combination of program volume, the wave volume, the master volume.  Because that is what reaches our ears.  I would love to set a program to be like "Whatever you have to do, never go louder than THIS setting.