Whether you’re watching a video, listening to music, or participating in a virtual meeting you can always use your mouse to click on the volume icon in the taskbar and adjust the slider to change the volume. While it’s easy, wouldn’t it be easy to change the volume with your keyboard? For example, if you are someone who adjusts the volume many times, using the mouse can be a bit tedious. Thankfully, you can turn the volume up or down with your keyboard.
In this quick and simple tutorial, let me show you how to change the volume with the keyboard even if your keyboard doesn’t have dedicated multimedia keys.
Change the volume with keyboard
If your keyboard has a multimedia key then you press them to turn the volume up or down and mute. Sometimes, you might have to press the Fn key to use the multimedia keys. This is especially true if your keyboard combines function and multimedia keys.
If your keyboard doesn’t have multimedia keys, you need to create custom keyboard shortcuts to control the volume on Windows. Thankfully, it is quite easy to do thanks to applications such as AutoHotKey.
Follow the steps provided below to learn how to control system volume with keys:
Step 1: Download and install AutoHotKey software from the official website. Link below.
Download link: https://www.autohotkey.com/ (Download AutoHotKey v2. v1 is deprecated).
Step 2: After installing AutoHotKey, right-click on your desktop and choose New > Text Document.
Step 3: Open the text file and paste the below script in it.
;WindowsLoop Volume Control Shortcuts (Alt + Up, Alt + Down, Alt + M)
!Up:: ; Alt + Up Arrow (Increase Volume)
{
Send("{Volume_Up}")
return
}
!Down:: ; Alt + Down Arrow (Decrease Volume)
{
Send("{Volume_Down}")
return
}
!M:: ; Alt + M (Mute/Unmute Volume)
{
Send("{Volume_Mute}")
return
}Step 4: Save the text file by pressing Ctrl + S and close the Notepad window.
Step 5: Rename the text file to VolumeControl.ahk. It is important that you replace the .txt extension with .ahk.
Step 6: Double-click on the newly created ahk file to run it. Once it starts running, it will sit in the taskbar.
From now on, you can use the Alt + Up arrow (!Up), Alt + Down arrow (!Down), and Alt + M (!M) to increase, decrease, and mute audio volume. I also recommend adding the AutoHotKey script to start up so that you can use the shortcut without launching the script manually. If you want to customize the shortcuts used to control volume, change the !Up, !Down, and !M part of the script with your choice of keys. For reference on how to use different keys, check out the AutoHotkey documentation — https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/KeyList.htm. It is pretty easy to understand and implement.
I hope this small tutorial helped you in managing audio with the keyboard.
If you are stuck or need help, send an email, and I will try to help as much as possible.
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