VolControl is an open-source application for Windows that makes it very easy for anyone to change the volume of the system. It displays an animated progress bar when any volume change is made. It allows the user to set special hotkeys for changing the volume, increasing, decreasing or muting the volume.
VolControl is available as a portable application. We can extract the contents of the downloaded package and launch VolControl.exe from there. As soon as we launch VolControl, it will place an icon in the notification area of Windows desktop. We can access some basic things using this notification area icon such as settings or a vertical volume control bar.
In the settings of VolControl we can choose the hotkeys for increasing the volume, decreasing the volume or muting the volume. By default, these keys are Win+Up, Win+Down and Win+Left respectively. But if your keyboard already has a media keys (they can be identified by a speaker icon), you can use the media keys instead. You can also choose the amount by which the volume is changed when you press these hotkeys once.
When you change the volume using these hotkeys, VolControl displays a colorful animated volume meter on your screen similar to the horizontal volume level meter displayed on your TV screen when you change the TV volume. We can customize this volume meter by changing the text font, text size, text format, text color etc. We can change the foreground and background colors, we can choose solid bar or gradient bar, we can make the volume meter have a border and select the location on the computer screen where it appears.
In order to use this program under Windows 10, we have to run this in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode. For this, we have to right-click on VolControl.exe, select Properties from the menu, select Compatibility tab, choose Windows XP SP3 and then click on the OK button. Only after using this trick, we are able to actually change the volume level on Windows 10.
You can download VolControl from https://sourceforge.net/projects/volcontrol/files/.