SetVol 1.4 contains a change to support a 'balance' feature which, based on how Windows works with the balance level, turned out to be more involved than I thought. Although its use is described in the help, I thought I would go into a little more detail here to help explain things.
First, here is how you can check your current audio device's balance levels in Windows (10):
- left click on the speaker icon in your system tray and select 'sound'
- on the window that pops up click on the 'Playback' tab
- click on your output audio device
- click on the 'Properties' button
- click on the 'Levels' tab
- click on the "Balance' button
There you will see how Windows handles balancing. In short, you will see each channel can be set to numbers between 0 and 100.
This was a little counter-intuitive for me as I only had a two-channel audio device (left and right speakers) and had thought the numbers could each be set between 0 and 100, as long as they add up to 100. For example: Left 80, Right 20. Not so, they can be both set to 100, and in fact an audio device can have many channels.
Regardless, after I thought about it a while it made sense, with something like 80, 20 it would be unclear how you could turn up one speaker all the way - the max you could get was 80 out of the speaker balanced to 80. Also, if the numbers could only add up to a 100, what would that look like for an eight-channel audio device setup?
SetVol 1.4 now supports a command called balance, which lets you set the balance levels independently for all channels.
For example:
setvol 100 balance 100:100
will turn the first two channels (usually the left and right speakers) to 100%
setvol 100 balance 80:100
will set the first channel to 80 and the second channel to 100
setvol 100 balance 80:20
will set the first channel to 80 and second channel to 20
setvol 50 balance 80:20
will set the first channel to 40 (80% of 50) and the second channel to 10 (20% of 50)
I took me a little getting use to, but it seems to work ok.
If you want to test this out on a device SetVol 1.4 also now supports a 'beep' command option, so you can test an eight channel devices as follows:
setvol 100 balance 100:0:0:0:0:0:0:0 beep report
setvol 100 balance 0:100:0:0:0:0:0:0 beep report
setvol 100 balance 0:0:100:0:0:0:0:0 beep report
...
setvol 100 balance 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:100 beep report
and hear which channel belongs to which speaker.
Also, using the 'report' option helps you keep track of which channel you are testing with.
Channels are numbered within Windows starting with channel 0, so I kept this convention with the SetVol 'report' option is specified
If you get lost and want to go back to the norm, you just need to open up the speaker icon in your system tray and slide it to 100 and then to 0 and then to whatever you want (for example 25) and then at that point the master volume, and all channels will be set to the same (in this example 25).
Another option would be to use the new 'aling' option with SetVol. For example:
setvol 25 align
aligns all volume levels to 25.
Hope this helps explain things.
Hope you can make use of the program.