Rig Blaster Soundcard and Windows menu fix for recording control

I love Windows. Really, I do, but sometimes it's a royal pain in the rear because it gets the idea it'll do what it wants to do and to heck with what you like. And with Windows 10 looking like a pay-to-subscribe service, Microsoft is looking more and more like a less viable option down the road and my old standby of Linux looks to be the next big thing, but that isn't the point of this article.

Enough said about pay operating systems! On to the point of this blog!

I have an ICOM-718 transceiver with a Rigblaster Plug and Play interface for my PSK31 and rig control and I really love the combination. Tied into my Windows 7 system for the rig control and PSK31 software, it's a dream... I turn on the computer, fire up my ICOM and I'm in business. Except for one thing...

Windows decides, every time I reboot, to turn the Rigblaster sound settings into a zombie by disabling the line-in recording control for the Rigblaster. Every single time. The image below shows the menu with the disabled line in.

Rigblaster line in deactivated on boot.
Note the red speaker setting.
Also, note the high-level setting on boot

So I end up having to fix it by right-clicking on the volume control, selecting the recording control and navigating to the proper menu to re-enable the recording. It's a lot of clicks to get to the right menu. It works, but I wish I didn't have to do this and go through this ritual every time I boot up.

I end up losing my custom settings and it really gets old fast.

WHY this automatic disabling issue happens, I know not. I do know it is repeatable every single time I reboot my Windows system. So... I can handle a quirk or two... after all, it's a strange thing we do with connecting our radios to PCs and doing all these amazing things. If someone could tell me why the recording portion of the sound card does disable itself on boot and if there is a way to stop this forever, I'd be grateful.

Trouble is... I'm tired of the endless navigation to get to the right menu. Why couldn't Windows let me get to the recording menu directly? Seems like a logical thing to save a few clicks and steps. So I decided to Google around and sure enough I found out how to create a direct link to the recording menu.

Recording Control Menu in Windows

This page at http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/56892-sound-shortcuts-create.html had the answer.

You can create a shortcut to the recording control by getting to the shortcut creation menu in Windows and creating a new Recording menu shortcut to get to the recording tab that controls the Rigblaster card. I have copied the text from the link above that is relevant and thank that author for a fine job of providing the fix to save a few steps in correcting my errant sound card.

It's all pretty simple - Just some cut and paste work to get your shortcut built:

To Manually Create a "Sound" Shortcut for the recording menu

1. Right click or press and hold on an empty area on your desktop, and click/tap on New and Shortcut.

2. Type the location below (better to cut and paste it) into the location area for what tab you want the Sound shortcut to open to, and click/tap on the Next button.

• Recording Tab
  • %windir%\System32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL mmsys.cpl,,1

Once done, you can reach the menu in fewer steps and make the needed corrections by reactivating the line in menu and setting the line level to somewhere between 10 and 20

The only downside is that the default icon is kind of boring. I used one of the default Windows icons to add a little variety and the shortcut now stands out on my task bar.

So, once you have the shortcut built, click it and up will pop your recording menu! Make your edits by getting to the line-in tab and make the needed fixes as shown in the menu below. Enjoy!

Line level reactivated and level set to between 10 and 20.
You will need to click the speaker icon to get it to reactivate.
Once done with the settings, click Ok and you will be back in business.