ClicKey : Make Key-Click Sound As You Type on Keyboard

If you had walked into any office back in 1970’s or 80’s, then you would hear a lot of typists using their noisy typewriters all at once. If you don’t believe me, then you can watch the movie “9 to 5” or “All the President’s Men”. Earlier computers also came with mechanical keyboards that made a lot of noise. This was normal back in those days, but now all the keyboards are very very silent. If you want to know how it felt to type on keyboards and typewriters that made noise, then you can use the ClicKey freeware for Windows.

ClicKey comes with twenty six different sounds built inside it. These are all basically recorded sounds of various keyboards and some of the typewriters. ClicKey is portable program. So you can launch ClicKey.exe to see it’s main interface. Now you can try pressing keys from a to z on your keyboard to hear all the sounds that ClicKey supports. Once you are happy with a sound, then click on the Set button to choose that sound and let ClicKey run in the background.

ClicKey

However many people would not want to start ClicKey this way all the time. If you decide to use this software for a long time, then you can set it to auto-run every time Windows starts. To do so, you can follow these steps:

  1. Open Windows Registry Editor by pressing Win+R key combination, typing regedit.exe and pressing Enter.
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run in Registry Editor.
  3. Select the Run sub-key, right-click on the right-side panel and choose New → String Value.
  4. Choose the name of the newly created value to be ClicKey.ClicKey
  5. Double-click on the newly created string value (ClicKey) and give it a value “C:\ClicKey.exe” sound=b volume=75. Obviously change the path of the ClicKey.exe file to wherever you have stored it on your PC and change the sound and volume parameters to your own choice.
  6. Restart your PC.

Conclusion: ClicKey gives the retro sound effect to your modern silent keyboards. Using this freeware tool, you can experience what it felt like to work in older offices where everyone was typing on their super noisy keyboards.

You can download ClicKey from https://www.grc.com/freeware/clickey.htm.

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