Volcon

If you don’t want to disturb your neighbors while watching a movie at home on your loud sound system, it’s best to have volume controls at hand. Although Windows lets you adjust it from the system tray, there aren’t any default hotkeys for this operation. However, this is where specialized applications like Volcon come in handy, and provide several ways to adjust system volume.

Once the application is installed and ready to go, an initial greeting screen pops up to let you know what needs to be done, and how. There’s no actual interface to the application, sitting quietly in the system tray most of the times, and only showing an indicator whenever volume changes.

What’s more, the system tray icon displays volume percentage in real time, but there’s only one style, with no other visual enhancements. Whenever volume goes up or down, the center of the desktop is also fitted with a small widget that changes in real time, according to the level of decibels, slowly fading away when you made up your mind.

The application wants to make it easier to change the system volume, without having to access any specific functions or areas. As such, it lets you combine different keyboard and mouse buttons, along with the mouse wheel, so you can choose the method that suits you best.

All of them are enabled by default, with a neat initial description presenting them, and you can even try them on the spot. Accessing the options menu lets you configure application behavior, whether to start with Windows, or even change methods used to change volume. Hotkeys can also be configured, with options to set one or more special buttons, along with mouse wheel or clicks.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Volcon is a practical desktop enhancement that makes volume adjustment as easy as can get. Flexibility is a major advantage, since you can combine different keyboard and mouse buttons. Notifications are displayed for every interaction, while the level of flexibility lets you configure several behavioral and visual settings.