Everyone knows how to change the volume on a Windows PC through the speaker icon in the notification area. We have to first click on the speaker icon and then a slider control opens up using which we can adjust the system volume easily. The appearance of this slider control has changed since the times of Windows XP, but the basic concept has stayed the same.
Another convenient method to change the system volume on Windows is through a multi-media keyboard which comes with dedicated volume-up and volume-down keys. Most of the laptops come with function keys that can be used to increase or decrease the system volume.
But now someone has come up with an even simpler method of changing the volume by using the mouse-wheel over the speaker icon. As you scroll-up using the mouse-wheel, the volume will increase. And similarly, the volume level can be reduced by scrolling -down over the speaker icon. However, for this we need a special open-source software called tb-vol-scroll.
tb-vol-scroll places another speaker icon in the system tray which responds to the mouse-wheel. The speaker color is also set yellow to show that it is not the operating system’s speaker icon. We can place the cursor over this speaker icon and use mouse-wheel to adjust the system volume. We can also right-click on this speaker to access system volume mixer and audio playback devices settings.
In the configuration window of tb-vol-scroll, we can choose to display the volume bar as we adjust the system volume using the scrolling action. We can also make the speaker icon appear in form of text instead of graphics. We can set how much the volume changes each time we scroll.
Scrolling action can be combined with special keys like Shift, Alt and Ctrl to carry out some other actions. For example, when we scroll over the speaker while pressing the Ctrl key, it will mute or unmute the volume. There is an option for inverting the scrolling action for people who think scroll up should reduce the volume and scroll down should increase it.
You can download tb-vol-scroll from https://github.com/dvingerh/tb-vol-scroll.