Prompt me before joining to confirm or select another audio source

 

 

Registry locations	HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Communicator\AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime
Allowed registry values	0: Automatically join a meeting using the default audio source 1: Prompt before joining or changing an audio source
Registry value type	REG_DWORD
Default setting	1: Prompt before joining or changing an audio source

 

As a general rule, Microsoft Lync gives you as many opportunities as possible to decide for yourself how you want the software to work. For example, each time you join a meeting Lync shows you the following dialog box and asks you to select the audio source for the meeting:

 

 

That's great. But suppose you always want to use Microsoft Lync as your audio source. In that case, it can be a bit of a hassle to have to dismiss the dialog box each time you join a meeting. Isn't there some way to keep this dialog box from popping up on screen?

 

Actually, there are several ways to keep this dialog box from popping up on screen. For one, you can click the Don't show this again checkbox before clicking OK; that will ensure that the Join Meeting Audio dialog box won't appear the next time you join a meeting from Microsoft Lync. Alternatively, you can clear the Prompt me before joining to confirm or select another audio source setting from within the Options dialog box:

 

 

If you clear that checkbox then the dialog box will not appear when you join a meeting. If you select that checkbox then the dialog box will appear when you join a meeting.

 

And, of course, you can always use a script to change the registry value HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator\AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime. Before we show you to do that, let's take a quick peek at a Windows PowerShell script that retrieves the current value of AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime. If you'd rather get this value from a remote computer, hey, no problem: simply set the value of the variable $computer to the name of that remote computer. For example:

 

$computer = "atl-ws-001.litwareinc.com"

 

Here's the script for retrieving the AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime value:

 

$computer = "."

 

$registry = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey("CurrentUser", $computer)

$key = $registry.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator", $True)

 

$value =$key.GetValue("AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime",$null)

if ($value -eq 1) {$value = "Yes"}

if ($value -eq 0) {$value = "No"}

Write-Host "Prompt me before joining to confirm or select another audio" `

    "source: $value"

 

And here's a script that sets the value of AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime. In this case, the script causes the dialog box to appear; that's done by setting AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime to 1. To suppress the appearance of the dialog box, set AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime to 0:

 

$key.SetValue("AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime",0,"DWORD")

 

In other words:

 

$computer = "."

 

$registry = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey("CurrentUser", $computer)

$key = $registry.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator", $True)

 

$key.SetValue("AllowOverridingDeviceAtJoinTime",1,"DWORD")