The latest update should hopefully solve the issue with Windows Vista, 7 & 8

@Niklas –
The Wave control is a compound control when it shows that message, which means that the wave volume control is a sub-control of the wave control. To access it (building off of Yair’s code – by the way, thanks, Yair. This helped me a lot), use something like this (tested with WinXP, Matlab R2009a):

% Loop over the Line's controls to find the Wave control (a compound
% control)
ctrls = line.getControls;
foundFlag = 0;
for ctrlIdx = 1 : length(ctrls)
    waveCtrl = ctrls(ctrlIdx);
    ctrlName = char(waveCtrl.getType);
    if ~isempty(strfind(lower(ctrlName),'wave'))
        foundFlag = 1;  break;
    end
end
if ~foundFlag
    error('Wave control not found');
end
% now find the volume control under the wave control
ctrls = waveCtrl.getMemberControls;
foundFlag = 0;
for ctrlIdx = 1:length(ctrls)
    waveVolCtrl = ctrls(ctrlIdx);
    ctrlName = char(waveVolCtrl.getType);
    if(~isempty(strfind(lower(ctrlName),'volume')))
        foundFlag = 1;
        break;
    end
end
if ~foundFlag
    error('Wave volume control not found');
end

@Niklas – different computer systems have different audio devices and drivers. My article merely showed how to solve the problem for the particular configuration that exists on my system. You can use the methodology that I explained above (for exactly this purpose), in order to solve the problem for your particular configuration. If you would like my assistance in your particular case, please email me offline.

-Yair

Thanks for this interesting blog post! I’m currently developing different sound related tests in Matlab and for calibration purposes with external equipment it is important that the computer output isn’t changed between the experiments. So, the above code example is really useful. However, since I’m using Windows XP I have another mixer fader to worry about, and that is the Wave fader in the Windows mixer…

If I use ctrlIdx = 4 I’m able to find the Wave fader, but this is not looking the same as for ctrlIdx = 1, where Matlab states “Volume with current value: 0.0 (range: 0.0 – 1.0)”, instead Matlab states “Wave Control containing Volume, Balance, and Mute Controls.”.

Do you have any suggestions how I can manage to be able to control the Wave fader as well?

Many thanks!

@Sebastian – yes: the program searched all the available controls in your computer’s speaker port’s Line object, and could not find any control that affects the volume. I suggest that you place breakpoints in the relevant loops (lines 53-65 and 81-92) to see why this is. For example, it is possible that you have more than one speaker ports in your system and the program searched the wrong port, or maybe you really don’t have programmatic access to the Volume control…

??? Error using ==> SoundVolume2
Volume control not found

(with Win XP)

Do you have an idea what could be wrong?

Best Regards

@Andrey – Since all of the SoundVolume functionality is Java-based, you can of course place it in a Java class, compile it, and load it into Matlab using javaObject or even directly.

This is a Matlab-centric blog, so I focus on how things can be done in Matlab. But of course they can also be done using other means. For example, calling an external executable utility or ActiveX that does the same thing…