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Changing the Volume of Auxiliary Audio-Devices

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[The feature associated with this page, Waveform Audio, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by WASAPI and Audio Graphs. WASAPI and Audio Graphs have been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use WASAPI and Audio Graphs instead of Waveform Audio, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

Windows provides the following functions to query and set the volume for auxiliary audio devices.

Function Description
auxGetVolume Retrieves the current volume setting of the specified auxiliary output device.
auxSetVolume Sets the volume of the specified auxiliary output device.

 

Not all auxiliary audio devices support volume changes. Some devices can support individual volume changes on both the left and the right channels.

Volume is specified in a doubleword value, as with the waveform-audio and MIDI volume-control functions. When the audio format is stereo, the upper 16 bits specify the relative volume of the right channel and the lower 16 bits specify the relative volume of the left channel. For devices that do not support left- and right-channel volume control, the lower 16 bits specify the volume level, and the upper 16 bits are ignored.

Volume-level values range from 0x0 (silence) to 0xFFFF (maximum volume) and are interpreted logarithmically. The perceived volume increase is the same when increasing the volume level from 0x5000 to 0x6000 as it is from 0x4000 to 0x5000.