Create a Shortcut or Hotkey to Mute the System Volume in Windows
Have you ever had music playing loudly on your speakers when the phone rings and then you fumble for the speaker switch or the pause button on your music playing application while trying to answer the phone? Instead of bothering with that, I’ve always simply created a shortcut to mute the system volume instantly with the press of a key.
Of course this isn’t terribly helpful if you have a multimedia keyboard with a mute button on-board, but some computers just don’t have one, or you don’t want to run the software required to make the keys work.
Create the Shortcut
In order to mute the system volume, we’ll use a small utility called NirCmd that we’ve mentioned numerous times before, since it’s the swiss army knife of useful shortcuts.
Right-click on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.
In the location box, you’ll want to browse down to the location of where you saved nircmd.exe, and then add “mutesysvolume 2″ as arguments. You’ll probably want to put quotes around the path to the executable, like this:
“C:\Path\To\nircmd.exe” mutesysvolume 2
Give the shortcut a useful name like “Toggle Mute”, and then open up the properties of the shortcut. Here you can assign a shortcut key, or you can change the icon to something else.
I found the speaker icon in the following file, but you can choose another icon if you’d like:
%SystemRoot%\System32\SndVol.exe
Remember when using a shortcut key, you’ll want to keep the shortcut on the desktop or move it into the Start menu.
