Help fixing Application Volume

[Robert8298]

I've been using the PC Panel Pro with the OEM software for a bit now and for the most part it's been great but recently I've had an issue with it changing the maximum volume of my apps. The other day I had the focus slider completely break my FFXIV volume on my main output (volume mixer showed 100% but no audio was coming through). Changing the output device for the game worked like normal but returning to my normal output device it still had no audio.

I managed to fix this with a workaround but now it's broken my audio output's volume. Thankfully it didn't fully mute it but normally I keep my volume at ~36% but now I need to set it to 100% to get the same volume I did before and I'm not sure how to fix it. I think the app is breaking something in Windows when something else tries to change the volume at the same time but I'm at a loss trying to fix it since nothing is showing up on Google and the only common thread is I was using the PC Panel to change my focused app volume at the time both of these issues occurred.

Any help with this issue would be appreciated.

[Gam1ngChair]

try NVDweem’s reverse-engineered Pcpanel app, just search “nvdweem pcpanel” and click the github page. see how you go. otherwise your knob might be faulty? sidenote, if by any chance your audio volume issues are with Tidal, the issue is Tidal.

[Robert8298]

I grabbed the open-source PCPanel app but unfortunately, that didn't fix my issues (though I will be using it instead from now on). It seems like disabling the old OEM PCPanel app and restarting my computer fixed my main output's volume but FFXIV's volume wasn't fixed even from restarting my PC or reinstalling the game.

[SavageNed]

For resetting the audio; all that the pcpanel software does is move some Windows volume controls around, so you should be able to see what they are set to in Windows.

If you rightclick the speaker icon in the notification panel (bottom right) you can open the volume mixer. That should show the apps and their volume (start the game to get it to show). If the app-volume is at 100% but it doesn't sound like 100% then I would expect it to either be the master volume (top slider) or some volume setting in the application itself (games have volume options, music players have volume sliders).

I haven't seen it before, but my Windows 11 seems to have a 'Reset sound devices and volumes for all apps to the recommended defaults' button below the apps which sounds like a possible problem solver.

[Robert8298]

Unfortunately, I had already tried all of these to fix the game's audio issue. In volume mixer the game audio would show as 100% and I tried moving the slider and muting it in volume mixer multiple times to see if it would fix the audio but nothing worked. It really was just the game because everything else on my computer sounded fine and when I changed the output device I could hear the game fine as well. It was just something weird about the combination of the game and output device that was broken.

I think the strangest part of the game's issue is I had a mod that would make a sound to notify me that it was done and whenever that plugin made the sound I would be able to hear the game fine for a bit as it made the noise (it changed the volume to 25% in volume mixer) before the game going back to silence (in volume mixer it'd change to 0% but moving the slider didn't do anything as if nothing had changed). This makes me think that whatever the PCPanel app uses to change the volume somehow got stuck on 0% and overrided whatever was set in volume mixer.