Hello lovely people 🙂
We’ve all been in the position at one time when you’re listening to your music and the phone rings. You are then trying to fumble for the pause button or the speaker switch on your music player, while trying to answer the phone. Sounds familiar? So, instead of bothering with all that *drama* we have created a shortcut to mute the sound instantly with just one press of a key. This is then the topic of our todays computer repairs article.
Naturally, this is not much help to anyone with a multi-media keyboard with a mute button already installed, but some keyboards do not have one or some that do, you just can’t be bothered running the software needed to make them work.
How to create the Shortcut
To be able to mute the system volume we use a small utility called NirCmd. We have mentioned this software before and it is the equivalent of a Swiss army knife for your PC
First right-click on the desktop and choose New Shortcut from the menu.
In the location box, you’ll want to browse down to the location of where you saved nircmd.exe, and then add “mutesysvolume 2″ as arguments. You’ll probably want to put quotes around the path to the executable, like this:
“C:PathTonircmd.exe” mutesysvolume 2
Please note that the “2″ argument tells nircmd to toggle mute, so if you use the shortcut or hotkey again, it will untoggle. We find this to be quite useful, but you could pass an argument of “1″ to only use mute. All of the arguments can be found on the NirCmd page.
Next give your shortcut a name such as “Toggle Mute”, or whatever you think is suitable. Next open up the properties of the shortcut. Here you can assign a shortcut key, or you can change the icon to something else.
We found the speaker icon in the following file, but you can choose any icon you like:
%SystemRoot%System32SndVol.exe
Remember when using a shortcut key, shortcut keys don’t seem to work when the shortcut is in the quick launch menu. So you’ll need to keep the shortcut on the desktop or move it into the Start menu
At the end you will still have a nice neat new shortcut that will mute and unmute the system volume at the press of a key.
Over and out from me, but if you need any help working this out, call our computer repairs lab and tell them I sent you 😉
MobileGeekette
