Features Overview

Features Overview

Volume control

• Mouse wheel over defined screen areas (taskbar, screen edges, title bars, desktop) or with a modifier key anywhere.
• Global hotkeys for volume up / down / mute, using your own key combinations.
• Mouse gestures and button combinations, for example middle-click to mute.
• Configurable step size — Settings → Main → volume change speed. Values up to 50 are accepted for very coarse steps; low values give fine control.
• Three volume curves: linear, logarithmic, and a table where values are defined directly. See Volume Behavior.
• Mute at zero volume and unmute on volume change options.

Devices

• Control the default playback device, or pin control to a specific device.
• Alternative device — a second device (or the microphone) with its own hotkeys, so two things can be controlled independently.
• Favorites list for quick switching by click.
• Audio device manager window for switching outputs without going through Windows Settings.
• Two tray icons — the volume icon and the device icon can be shown together (FAQ #11). Playback and microphone icons can both be present.

Applications

• Per-application volume: set Change volume for → Specified applications on the Alternative device, then bind hotkeys to it. This turns a game down without touching the browser.
• Volume mixer window. By default it shows about three applications; the rest are reachable with the scrollbar.

On-screen display

• OSD with skins, including Windows 10 and Windows 11 light and dark styles and a WinXPControl style.
• Free positioning, colours, progress-bar background colour, fonts, transparency and timeout.
• Ability to hide the Windows system volume OSD (FAQ #8).
• Skins are plain folders containing a Skin.xml, so they can be edited or added.

Notifications

Settings → System → Notifications can announce:

• system volume changes
• USB device connect / disconnect
• new playback device
• CD tray open

Each can be turned off individually. This matters more than it appears — see the OSD drift problem.

Scheduler

A built-in task scheduler that can, at a given time or on a given event:

• change the volume to a set level
• switch the audio device
• run a program

A task triggered on device change is the recommended way to give each output its own volume level. See Scheduler and Remote Access.

Remote access

An optional local HTTP server (default port 22222) that serves a small control page plus endpoints for listing and executing scheduler tasks. Intended for LAN use from a phone or browser. See Scheduler and Remote Access.

Screen brightness

Volume² can also change monitor brightness — add Brightness+ / Brightness- hotkeys. It uses the standard Windows API where possible and changes brightness programmatically where that is not available (FAQ #2). On external monitors this drives the monitor's own brightness over DDC.

Interface

• 33 languages, including English, Ukrainian, Russian, Greek, Chinese, Armenian, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean.
• Portable and installed builds share the same feature set.

What it is not

Volume² is a volume and device control tool, not an audio processing tool. It has no equalizer, no bass boost, no channel swapping and no ASIO support. See Limitations and Feature Requests.