Contriving

A hotkey to switch between headphones and speakers. Soundswitch.

I use USB headphones. I also use regular speakers connected to my sound card. Windows makes it a multi-step process to switch from headphones to speakers.  However, a nice thing about Windows 7 is that changes to the output and recording device take place immediately and you don’t have to restart the current app.  For example, if you’re playing a game on speakers and use the configured hotkey to switch to your USB headphones, the sound immediately starts playing back on the headphones.

I tired of this, so I wrote a program to rectify the situation and I called it Soundswitch because I’m a wordsmith. You can find this program here:

soundswitch_v2.03 – (latest version)

sound_switch_v2.01

Basic Use and Installation

Unzip it to the directory of your choice.

Look in the Sound applet in control panel to see which two sound devices you want to switch between. In the following image, the two I switch between are labeled 1 and 4. Thus, in the ini file, I used 1 for Source1 and 4 for Source2.  Update:  Note that the number of items will vary based upon whether you have “Show Disabled Devices” and “Show Disconnected Devices” checked (Right click anywhere in the list to see these).  For the purposes of Sound Switch make sure both options are checked before counting the items. The screenshot below doesn’t reflect this.

The ini by default has the switch key assigned to Ctrl-Alt-F12. Edit this as you like.

Tested on Win7 x64 and Vista x32.   Update:  XP no longer works with the latest updates.  Use this older version for XP compatibility:  soundswitch

Any comments on this are welcome and I’ll try to fix any bugs reported.

Version 2 Notes

I’ve added a good number of features in the latest version. All accessible through the .ini file.

• “Scroll” through each enabled item in your Sound panel.
• Hide the tray icon
• Switch between two speaker configurations for your current active playback device
• Switch/scroll just the default comm device, default playback device, or both
• Hotkey to terminate the program

How I recovered my photos and much of the metadata with a few tools (Part 1)

There I was looking to centralize all the storage in my house on a Windows Home Server. I have 8 hard drives that were scattered among 4 PCs and it was just getting impossible to manage in any sane way. As part of this process, I was taking all but one of the hard drives out of each PC while at the same time carefully managing the process of backing the important data on each one into the free space amongst the others.

The Problem

Where I ran into problems is when I went to bed one night during this process. When I woke up the next morning I forgot that I hadn’t finished completely backing up one of the most important hard drives in the house. So, I went ahead with my plan and formatted it.

Big mistake.

It was a little while before I realized what I had done and by the time I did realize it, I had already installed a fresh copy of Vista on it and a few applications. As anyone who has tried to recover data before will tell you, the first thing you should do after accidentally formatting/deleting data is immediately stop writing data to the hard drive!

This hard drive contained all of our personal photos. While the fact that these were personal photos was bad enough, what was even worse was that a huge portion of them (gigabytes) were photos that my wife had spent countless hours manually scanning in and she was in the process of organizing and labeling them.

Getting the data back

So, after realizing my error, I immediately shut off the computer and removed the hard drive.  While I knew the general ideas behind data recovery, I wasn’t really aware of what I should do next, so I hit the internet and did some research.  After awhile I decided to put the hard drive into another PC and try out some various utilities I had come across to scan it and see what kind of data could be recovered.  This turned out to be an exercise in frustration, as all the tools I used just turned out reams of information that would of taken me years to go through and find anything of use.

I was beginning to brace myself for the inevitable storm that would follow after telling my wife that all the photos were gone.  At this point, a friend of mine pointed me towards a tool called PhotoRec.  At a high level, PhotoRec operates like many data recovery tools in that it looks at the unused space on your hard drive for orphaned data, which is often the data you had on their previously.  Where PhotoRec saved me was that it was written specifically to recognize photo data, which saves me from being buried in a mountain of information.

Since we had thousands and thousands of photos, I don’t really have any way to know if any of our photos were lost, but PhotoRec recoverd so many (after 6+ hours of processing) that it seems like I have our whole library back.

In my next post on the subject, I’ll talk about how PhotoRec wasn’t all I needed.

See part 2 of this post here.