Sunday, June 8, 2008

Control Volume with Mouse Scrollwheel with Volumouse! (review)

Two of my favorite geek blogs, Likehacker and Freewaregenius, both featured Volumouse recently, and I finally decided to try it out.

I have a media keyboard that allows me to change the volume up and down, but being able to control with the scrollwheel allows me to do so without having to move my hand away from the mouse.

Volumouse has tons of customizable features as well, as you can see from the options screenshot:

As you can see I set volume to be controlled by holding down either mouse button, or holding down a key, or even more specific resolutions that you set yourself. You can also set it to display an indicator that lets you see your volume go up and down under your mouse cursor (visual indicators are great). It even allows you to adjust window transparency (!) via scroll, which just seems like overkill (and didn't work properly for me).

In fact, this last issue is one of my only gripes about the otherwise excellent program. Currently Volumouse is taking up about 4 megabytes of RAM, which seems high for a utility that I only use occasionally for less than a few seconds at a time. I think this is because of the sheer depth of the program, which isn't necessary since I don't think anyone's downloading Volumouse for reasons other than controlling their volume with their mouse. For a lesson in minimal RAM usage with maximum features, check out Taskswitch XP.

Overall though, I'm keeping Volumouse installed and running in my system tray, and I think you should too.

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