One of the problems with listening to music or watching movies on the PC is that some songs or movie scenes play too loud and others are not even audible. So you often find yourself manually adjusting volume level – setting it higher when music is inaudible and setting it lower when music or movies are playing too loud. This is when Sound Lock comes to rescue. Sound Lock is a freeware application for Windows that clips the volume level if it goes over the pre-selected volume level, so that music plays loud but not too loud on your system.
Sound Lock can be downloaded from its website at 3appes.com. The download is around 500 kilobytes and is in form of an MSI installer package. After installation, you can run this application from its Start Menu shortcut. Upon running, it places an icon in the Windows notification area (system tray). You can click on this system tray icon to open the Sound Lock volume level adjustment window. You have to click on the ON button under the slider to enable Sound Lock.
You can adjust this slider to set the maximum volume level. As you drag the slider up and down, the red line goes up and down indicating maximum volume level allowed in your system. If an application playing movie or music, tries to play sound louder that this set limit, then Sound Lock clips the volume level and does not let it cross this threshold.
In the settings accessible through its system tray icon, you can select the filter mode (per channel or master), output channels and output device. You can also choose to keep the Sound Lock window always on top to see how it is working. Note that Sound Lock works only on playback devices and not on recording devices (like Line In). If you have a TV tuner card and you watch TV on it then its volume will probably not be adjusted by Sound Lock.
This is great if you want to watch a horror or action movie late at night. Some of the scenes in such movies are very quiet dialog while others contain loud screaming. If you are using Sound Lock, then you can adjust the maximum volume level so that you can hear the low volume dialog but which clips the volume during the loud screaming and yelling scenes.
You can download Sound Lock from : http://www.3appes.com/en/developments/4/sound-lock-released/.