Some of you especially gamers may have more than one sound device such as an external speaker and a headset. You may want to use the headset when it is late at night and don’t want to wake up your family members or if you want to talk to your friends so that it doesn’t transmit the sound from speaker to the microphone. To select which devices to use, you will have to manually choose which device for playback from Control Panel > Sound or alternatively you can right click on the speaker icon at the notification area and select “Playback devices”. The same goes to selection of Microphone to use but at the Recording tab. If you’re looking for an automated way to switch the default playback devices by clicking on a shortcut, here are 2 free tools that can help you achieve that.
The first tool that is easier to use is called Set Sound Device or SSD in short. All you need to do is run SetSoundDevice tool, select which sound device that you want to set as default from the drop down menu and click the Change Default Sound Device button. A shortcut will be created and saved at the same location to where the SSD is. Whenever you want to switch to that particular sound device, simply run the shortcut and the default sound device will be automatically switched. You may want to create another shortcut so that you can also easily switch it back by running the shortcut.
The second software is NirCmd which is a more advanced tool created by Nir Sofer. NirCmd is a Windows command line tool that allows you to do some useful tasks without displaying any user interface and one of it is setting the default sound device on Windows 7/Vista/2008. The command line to use is as follow:
nircmd.exe setdefaultsounddevice [Device Name] {Role}
The [Device Name] is the name of the device, as appeared in the sound devices list of windows, for example: Speakers, Line In, Microphone, and so on… The {Role} parameter is optional and may countain one of the following values: 0 for Console (the default value), 1 for Multimedia, and 2 for Communications. To automate switching of sound devices with NirCmd, you will need to manually create a shortcut with appropriate command line switches.
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