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Quickmix

QuickMix is a freeware an applet that allows you to store all or part of the current state of your audio mixer in a settings file, and to restore the mixer to that state whenever you want. I use it mainly to save the audio settings for my data modes software, but it can be used for any software that uses the sound card.

Once you have the audio mixer set just right for your data modes software (or any software that uses the sound card), run QuickMIx. The screen on the right will appear.

If your computer has more than one audio mixer a drop-down box allows you to select the one you want to use (and that is used by your data modes software).

The checkboxes on the QuickMix panel allow selection of the mixer channels that you want to save. These may be ‘play’ and ‘record’ but there may be others depending on the sound card you have and the audio drivers that you are using.

Having selected the channels you want to save, Click the ‘Save…’ button. This display a file dialogue. Choose a location to store the settings and a file name that reflects the type of data mode software you are using and then click the ‘Save’ button to save the settings in that file. I simply use ‘MMTTY’ for my MMTTY RTTY software and ‘DigiPan’ for my DigiPan PSK software, etc. The audio settings for each piece of software are therefore uniquely saved.

Loading the audio settings is just as easy. When you want to run a program that uses the sound card, run QuickMix first. Click the ‘Load…’ button and a file dialogue reappears. Each file in the dialogue represents different sets of audio mixer settings. So, if you called the audio mixer settings for MMTTY as ‘MMTTY’, then click on this file, click ‘Open’, and the audio settings will be appropriately set. Run MMTTY and the correct audio settings will already be set.

QuickMix runs under Windows 9x/ NT /Me /2000 /XP, although I can only vouch for it running under XP. Sorry, there doesn’t seem to be a ‘Mac’ version and I’m sure the Linux aficionados will have an alternative solution too.

A couple of provisos: mixer settings can only be restored if the sound card and driver software are the same as when the settings were initially saved; and the software can only work with audio mixers with up to 10 channels and 300 individual controls (should be sufficient for most of us mere mortals!).

The ‘qmx’ file into which the audio mixer settings are saved is a standard Windows INI file, so the settings can be edited with any text editor such as Windows NOTEPAD, should you feel so bold.

The current version of QuickMix is 1.06 and can be obtained free, from the following URL: http://www.ptpart.co.uk/quickmix/

Thanks to Andrew (G8GNI) for contributing this article.