As many of you know, I love playing Battlefield 2142. I often play it while talking with my buddies on Skype. However, one very annoying problem with the game is that when you start playing, it will mute the microphone volume so that I can’t hear myself talking. This causes me to yell because I can’t hear myself (the wife doesn’t care for that).
The steps to un-mute the microphone meant that I had to:
- load the game
- go into the audio configuration to trigger the mute
- exit to the main screen
- Alt+Tab out of the program
- open my sound devices
- un-mute the mic
- try to get back into the game which sometimes doesn’t work
It would be so nice if there were only a way to create a keyboard shortcut to perform this operation automatically. Oh wait… there is! Yes, I found such a program to make it all happen and here is what you need:
- Download NirCmd. Unzip the contents someplace permanent such as in it’s own folder somewhere on your hard drive.
- In this same folder, create a .bat file (text file renamed to something like unmute.bat).
- In this text file, paste the following command as outlined on this page.
.NirCmd.exe mutesysvolume 2 microphone - Create a desktop shortcut to that .bat file.
- Right click the shortcut and select Properties.
- Create a Shortcut Key such as M which will be created as Ctrl+Alt+M
- Save and play.
Now, when you press Ctrl+Alt+M, your microphone volume will either mute or un-mute. Tada.
*Update: This doesn’t seem to work within the game. The shortcut works outside of the game, but apparently the binding system of the game overwrites the shortcuts for the desktop. I need to find a way to bind a key I guess?
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