How to change default audio input device programatically

Question

I am looking for a way to set/change default input device inside my application. I have several different recording devices and it is very anoying to go into the control panel and change default recording device. I was looking around and I did not find anything that could help me with the problem. Application is written in c# and it is targeted for Windows Vista / Windows 7.

Answer 1

This can now (actually for quite some time already) be done very easily using theAudioSwitcher.AudioApi.CoreAudio NuGet package .

Simply create a new CoreAudioController :

var controller = new AudioSwitcher.AudioApi.CoreAudio.CoreAudioController();

Get hold of the desired device using its GUID:

var device = controller.GetDevice(Guid.Parse(...));

And lastly set it as the default playback device:

controller.DefaultPlaybackDevice = device;

Note: this answer was also posted under this question .

Answer 2

There is no public API to do this in Vista/7 AFAIK.

For a media center launch thing I created, I had to open the control panel and send keys to the dialog, a big ugly hack, but it's the best you can do. (Or run .net reflector on media center (It is able to change it, using undocumented calls))

Answer 3

If you had Windows XP, apparently , you can do this by editing the registry. The key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Multimedia\\Sound Mapper\\Playback contains the name of the current default playback device.