QuickSoundSwitch

You can connect an impressive array of devices to your computer, and instruments or more hardware components of the same type don't make exceptions. When it comes to sound, dedicated cards provide better quality and playback and there are virtual ones for special applications. What QuickSoundSwitch aims to do is let you quickly make use of another card by simply pressing a few buttons.

A neat advantage is that you don't need to go through a setup process because the application is portable. This means registries remain intact, the application only taking over the command from basic Windows features and provides enhanced ease of access.

Most of the time you find the application sitting quietly in the system tray, with a majority of controls accessible from there. A small menu pops up as soon as you click it, with options letting you create shortcuts through a wizard-driven process, view Windows audio settings, reload the list of sound cards, set volume and select device to be used.

You might want to pay a visit to the settings menu because several options to switch between sound cards can be configured from there. As such, you can assign custom hotkeys for every device you use, with an additional option to have an application launched. This greatly comes in handy for audio editing enthusiasts.

Another method is to create shortcuts on your desktop, with the process being rather easy and taking little of your time. A drop-down menu lets you select for which device to create the shortcut, choose whether or not to set the volume to a specific level and even run an application, by simply dragging it over an indicated area.

There's an implemented mixer at your disposal, which only differs from the Windows default one in terms of visuals. Another slider can be brought up to adjust volume, but oddly enough, hotkey support is not implemented for it.

However, after some time spent going through all of its features, you might re-consider and stick to default methods. This is because the application does not seem to always function the way it should, with sliders indicating change, but audio feedback proving otherwise.

All things considered, we can safely state that QuickSoundSwitch only comes with good intentions, but needs a lot more work to fully come in handy. Starting with the rough visual design and ending with frustrating functionality issues, reliability considerably plunges towards zero. It's only a pity, especially because of the variety of accessibility enhancement methods put at your disposal.