Automatically switch between your PC’S speakers and mics
What you need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 Time required: 30 minutes
You probably have multiple speakers, headphones and microphones attached to your computer (those built into your laptop, Bluetooth headsets and so on). Windows lets you set default devices for playing and recording audio, but it’s not so easy to quickly switch between them. To do this, you need Soundswitch. This clever program lets you switch using keyboard shortcuts and set up profiles so that Windows switches automatically when you open a specific program.
STEP 1
Go to www.snipca.com/38745, click the blue ‘Download Soundswitch…’ button 1 , then run the EXE file that downloads. Follow the installation through and, in the final step, untick all options except Launch Soundswitch 2 . The Soundswitch window should now appear. If not, right-click the Soundswitch icon in the system tray 3 and select Settings. Don’t worry if you see pop-up windows saying that Soundswitch can’t register certain keyboard shortcuts – we’ll explain how to change these shortcuts in a moment.
STEP 2
To use a keyboard shortcut to switch between multiple speakers, select the Playback tab 1 . The ‘Connected’ section shows all speakers currently attached to your computer. On our laptop, it shows three speakers - one attached to our monitor 2 , a set of Logitech Bluetooth speakers 3 , and the built-in speakers 4 . In the Disconnected section, you’ll see all speakers previously connected to your computer. Tick the speakers you want to be able to switch between. You can then use the keyboard shortcut displayed at the bottom 5 to cycle through them. To change this shortcut, click the box, then enter your chosen key combination.
STEP 3
The ‘Recording’ tab 1 shows similar options for microphones attached to your computer. As with your speakers in the Playback tab, you can select the ones you want to switch between and change the shortcut in the box in the bottom-left corner 2 . Soundswitch also lets you quickly mute and unmute your currently selected microphone (useful if you want to ensure you can’t be heard during a group video call). This feature is disabled by default – to enable it, tick the ‘Hotkey enabled’ box 3 in the ‘Toggle mute’ section. The default shortcut is Alt+ctrl+m (as before, you can change this).
STEP 4
Soundswitch also lets you set up profiles that switch automatically. In our example, we want to play all audio from our media player (VLC, www.videolan.org) through our large Bluetooth speakers, but leave all other audio (Windows notifications and so on) playing through our laptop’s speakers, which are currently set as the default. In the Profiles tab 1 , click Add 2 , then give your profile a name – we’ll call ours VLC 3 . Because we don’t want the profile to play all audio through our speakers, we’ll leave the ‘Also switch default device’ box 4 unticked.
STEP 5
Soundswitch shows a pop-up window each time a profile is activated. We’ll show you how to customise these notifications in a moment, but you can untick the ‘Notify when profile is triggered’ box 1 if you want to turn them off. Next, in the Playback dropdown menu, select the speakers you want to use for this profile – we’ll select ‘Speakers (Logi Z207 Stereo)’ 2 , which are our Bluetooth speakers. The Recording box 3 lets you set the microphone for this profile, but we’ll leave this blank because we want to only listen to audio in VLC, not record it.
STEP 6
The ‘Triggers’ section lets you specify what needs to happen in order for the profile to be activated. We want the profile to activate when we open VLC, so we selected ‘Name of the program’ 1 from the Available Triggers dropdown menu, then clicked Add 2 . In the box that appears at the bottom of the window, type the name of the program - for our profile, we’ll type vlc 3 here. Click ‘Save’ when you’ve finished, then close the Add Profiles window. You can now test the profile by opening the program that you specified as the trigger.
STEP 7
Once you’ve created your profiles, it’s best to set Soundswitch to start when you turn on your computer. Select the Settings tab 1 , then tick the ‘Start automatically with Windows’ box 2 . While in the Settings tab you can also change the style of the notification that appears when you switch between your audio devices, click the Notification dropdown menu (to hide the banner and instead play a sound of your choice, select Customized Sound Notification 3 ). Click ‘Close’ once you’ve made your changes – Soundswitch will continue to run in the background.