Windows 7 – How to Open Volume Control Popup from Command Prompt

There's a setting which may be causing this. Go to your sound options (right click the systray icon and click playback devices) then click "Communications", select "Do nothing". If something is triggering your communication channel it'll reduce your audio.

Volumouse seems to do what you want. But you will have to set it up.

In my example setup, I click the More button of first slot and choose "Change the volume for application in focus" under Windows 7/Vista/2008 Options.

I can now hold Alt key and roll my mouse wheel to control volume of the window (focused) window. It works in Firefox, Opera, Steam and itself but fails in Chrome (probably because of the multiple processes). So I use slot 2 specifically for Chrome and I click the More button to set it up like this:

I also chose to use hot-keys (keyboard shortcuts) instead of mouse wheel to showcase that feature here. I can now control Chrome's volume using the keyboard shortcuts anywhere (no need to switch to Chrome first), another advantage of exe-specific volume control. Note that you don't need to specify full path, but it's safer to do so. You can also just specify the file name (chrome.exe).

Using Volumouse with keyboard shortcuts: Combining the settings "Use hot-keys instead of mouse wheel" (blue method) and "Change the volume for application in focus" (red method) worked better for Psycogeek as the hot-keys were functioning in applications where the mouse wheel didn't.

Another tip: If you want an easy way to bring up the standard Volume Mixer of Windows, you can create a shortcut to C:\Windows\System32\SndVol.exe and assign a keyboard shortcut in the shortcut's properties. Or you can pin it on the taskbar.

Another thing to note: When using a 64Bit system, volumouse is running 2 processes a 32bit and a 64bit. If your having problems with it controlling only 32bit or only 64bit programs, check to see if both 32&64 were installed and running.