Create Hotkey to Mute or Unmute Volume in Windows

I had a great multimedia keyboard for almost two years and as all the multimedia keyboards do, it had all the special function keys like volume up, volume down, volume mute, play, stop and so on. But one night my little five year old niece thought of playing drum with this keyboard. Long story in short – the keyboard ended up getting smashed into little pieces. For some work I had to take out one of old and faithful regular keyboard. This keyboard was good enough for late night work, but I was feeling irritated as it did not have any volume mute key. So I quickly put together a simple program called Muter that can quickly mute or unmute the volume in Windows. And if you assign a hotkey to Muter, then your keyboard will have a volume mute key of its own.

Here is how you can create a shortcut key to quickly mute or unmute volume in Windows:

  1. Download Muter from https://www.trishtech.com/downloads/muter.zip.
  2. Extract Muter.exe from the downloaded archive and place it somewhere in your hard disk.Instant Muter
  3. Copy the Muter.exe from its current location (select this file and then press Ctrl+C to do this) and then right-click on Windows desktop and choose Paste Shortcut to create a shortcut to Muter on your desktop.Instant Muter
  4. When shortcut is created, right-click on this new shortcut and choose Properties from the context-menu.
  5. In the shortcut’s properties window, select the Shortcut tab. Then click on the Shortcut key text field and press any hotkey that you want to assign to this shortcut. For example, you can press F7 key, just keep in mind that this hotkey should not be already assigned to some other program.Instant Muter
  6. Close the properties window by clicking on the OK button. Now when you press the newly assigned shortcut key on your keyboard, the volume gets muted. Press it again, the volume gets unmuted.

Instant Muter for Windows can be very useful for people who, for some reason, are using regular keyboards but want to have the basic volume mute/unmute function through their keyboards.

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