Tray Levels

Overview

What Is EarTrumpet?

A standalone volume mixer for Windows with per-app sliders and live peak metering. Here is the plain description, without the marketing.

A tray flyout floating above a taskbar, listing four applications with sliders. PLAYBACK · SPEAKERS
The flyout, above the taskbar: one row per application

EarTrumpet is a small application that lives in the Windows notification area and replaces the volume flyout you get when you click the speaker icon. Instead of one slider for the whole system, you get one row per application, each with its own slider, its own level meter and its own output device.

That is the entire idea. It does not process audio, it does not add effects, and it does not sit in the signal path. It talks to the same Windows audio sessions the built-in mixer talks to, and shows them in a way that is quicker to reach.

EarTrumpet for Windows: the short list

  • Per-app volume sliders for everything currently making sound.
  • Move apps between playback devices without touching Settings.
  • Default playback device management from the same flyout.
  • Configurable hotkeys for opening the mixer and adjusting levels.
  • Multi-channel aware peak metering beside each slider.
  • Light and dark themes plus every Windows accent colour.
  • More than twenty languages, contributed by translators.

Free & Open Source

The project is developed in the open by File-New-Project. The source code, the issue tracker and the change log are all public on GitHub, which means you can read exactly what the app does before you run it — a reasonable thing to want from anything that sits in your notification area permanently.

Microsoft Store Award 2022

EarTrumpet won the Open Platform category of the 2022 Microsoft Store Community Choice Awards. It has also been mentioned by The Verge, Windows Central and Linus Tech Tips as an alternative to the built-in mixer. Awards are not a substitute for reading the source, but they do tell you the project has been around and looked at.

What it is not

It is not an equaliser, a virtual cable, a loudness normaliser or a driver. If an app is not producing sound, it will not appear in the list. If your audio problem is a driver problem, a mixer will not fix it — that is a Device Manager job.

It is also not a Microsoft product, despite living in the Microsoft Store. It is a community project that happens to be distributed there.

Where the official sources are

This site is a guide, not a mirror. The project's own site is eartrumpet.app, and the code lives on GitHub.com. Those two places are the only ones worth trusting for the application itself; anything else claiming to distribute it deserves suspicion.