USB Volume Control

[Kurotetsu]

A long time friend of mine is finally going to be upgrading his audio experience a little. He currently uses a fairly old (hardware-wise) Pentium 4 Dell machine, and up until now has been listening from a pair of dinky little Dell speakers being fed by the onboard audio.

He managed to grab a used HT Omega Striker 7.1, and I'll be passing my JVC HA-RX900s over to him, which will be fed directly by the sound card. The only concern right now is volume control. His keyboard does not have a volume knob, and using the Windows volume control would be difficult while gaming. I digged around and found a USB volume control he could probably use:

Griffin Technology: PowerMate - USB Multimedia Controller

(I already know Amazon has it for cheaper)

I wanted to know if anyone else had used that, and if it was an effective solution for his needs.

[olblueyez]

Volume knob on the JVC?

[leeperry]

Volumouse all the way

[Kurotetsu]

Originally Posted by olblueyez

Volume knob on the JVC?

Err, the RX-900 doesn't have a volume knob.

[Kurotetsu]

Originally Posted by leeperry

Volumouse all the way

How well would this work while gaming? Would this interfere with any in-game control settings (like using the mouse wheel to switch weapons)?

[falkon72]

Kuro,
I was just about to suggest the Powermate. It works well, even in games because it directly maps to the windows/mac volume control command, not a hotkey. However, don't expect it to be more than it is. Expect a beautiful, functional volume knob and you'll be fine.

[leeperry]

ahhh, I don't use it in games...only music and movies.

I can just hover the mouse over the desktop/taskbar or ANY window titlebar...and the mousewheel will control the main volume(I use KS in my players so KMixer is bypassed anyway)

for games, well...there's a volume control in there anyway? or he can set 2 hotkeys in Volumouse too

I was desperately missing a volume knob when I went from an external to an internal soundcard, but Volumouse is just outstanding...and even better than a volume knob tbh!

[leeperry]

Originally Posted by falkon72

I was just about to suggest the Powermate. It works well, even in games because it directly maps to the windows/mac volume control command, not a hotkey.

but it's another icon in the tasktray, and the app sucks up quite a lot of RAM IIRC.

Volumouse can run "stealth" in the back and takes 4MB of RAM

[chews89]

^Powermates look awesome! 1 point for powermates. But they're expensive.. -1