I use USB headphones. I also use regular speakers connected to my sound card. Windows makes it a multi-step process to switch from headphones to speakers.

I tired of this, so I wrote a program to rectify the situation and I called it Soundswitch because I’m a wordsmith. You can find this program here:

Available here.

Basic Use and Installation

Unzip it to the directory of your choice.

Look in the Sound applet in control panel to see which two sound devices you want to switch between. In the following image, the two I switch between are labeled 1 and 4. Thus, in the ini file, I used 1 for Source1 and 4 for Source2. Update: Note that the number of items will vary based upon whether you have “Show Disabled Devices” and “Show Disconnected Devices” checked (Right click anywhere in the list to see these). For the purposes of Sound Switch make sure both options are checked before counting the items. The screenshot below doesn’t reflect this.

The ini by default has the switch key assigned to Ctrl-Alt-F12. Edit this as you like.

Tested on Win7 x64 and Vista x32. Update: XP no longer works with the latest updates. Use this older version for XP compatibility: soundswitch

Any comments on this are welcome and I’ll try to fix any bugs reported.

Version 2 Notes

I’ve added a good number of features in the latest version. All accessible through the .ini file.

“Scroll” through each enabled item in your Sound panel.

Hide the tray icon

Switch between two speaker configurations for your current active playback device

Switch/scroll just the default comm device, default playback device, or both

Hotkey to terminate the program