OSD Skins and Tray Icon

OSD, Skins and Tray Icon

The on-screen indicator

Settings → On-screen display (OSD) controls the popup shown when the volume changes: skin, position, size, colours, progress-bar background colour, transparency and how long it stays on screen.

Skins

Volume² ships with several OSD skins, including Windows 10 and Windows 11 light and dark styles and WinXPControl.

• Skins live in the Osd Skins folder inside the program directory. Additional skin archives are unpacked straight into Volume2\Osd Skins.
• Each skin is a folder containing a Skin.xml plus its images, so skins can be edited or created by hand.

Changing a skin's font colour and size

Font colour and size are defined in the skin's Skin.xml.

1. Copy the skin folder under a new name, so the original remains available.
2. Edit Skin.xml in the copy.
3. Restart Volume² — skins are read when the program loads, so edits made while it is running have no visible effect.
4. Select the new skin in Settings.

Step 3 is the usual reason an edited Skin.xml appears to do nothing.

Hiding the Windows system volume OSD

Volume² can suppress the standard Windows volume popup so that only one indicator appears. This is done through a specific hotkey configuration, documented with screenshots in FAQ #8.

Suppression is not automatic. If both indicators appear after installing on Windows 11, set up the FAQ #8 hotkey configuration — that is what performs the suppression.

Keeping the Windows indicator instead of the Volume² skin

Disabling Enable OSD turns off the Volume² skin but does not restore the native Windows indicator; the result is no indicator at all, including when the keyboard volume keys are used.

Two related points:

• The system icon on Windows 11 cannot be hidden.
• The NotifyVolumeType user variable affects volume and device notifications; NotifyVolumeType = -1 disables the notification. Back up Config.ini before changing user variables.

The tray icon

• The tray icon shows the current level, with three built-in colour variants of the triangle: blue, black and white.
• The volume icon and device icon can be shown together (FAQ #11).
• Tray skins are available from the project repository.

The triangle colour and the digit colour and font are fixed; they are not configurable the way the OSD progress-bar background colour is.

Known OSD problems

The OSD stops appearing after a while

The volume still changes, but nothing is drawn. Toggling the OSD option off and on does not help, and neither does the show/hide command. Restarting Volume² restores it.

First, enable Settings → System → Restart the hooks every 500 ms (FAQ #5). If the OSD still stops appearing over long uptimes, report it with the build number and how long the program had been running.

The OSD moves off screen by itself (multi-monitor / domain)

On multi-monitor domain-joined PCs, a Group Policy refresh can make the indicator blink with device connected / device disconnected messages and then drift, sometimes beyond the edge of the screen, scrambling the coordinates stored in Settings.

Workaround: Settings → System tab → Notifications → disable

• USB connect / disconnect
• system volume
• CD tray open

This stops the notifications that trigger the repositioning.

Tray icon distorted at 4K with 150 % scaling

At 4K resolution with 150 % display scaling, the level drawn on the original tray icon can appear torn or distorted. A different tray skin avoids it.