Ciao..

a simple question..

when you use the hotkeys or the utfs.
the adjustment is so slow..

is it something to speed it upp.. somehow.

It takes as long to change the volume as it takes for the current buffered data to play. i.e. If you've got 1000 ms of buffer, expect at least 1 second before the volume will change.

but other players act differently there..

i must admit this is THE one disturbing thing for me in foobar

depends, whether you're adjusting the volume of the actual data as foobar does, or whether you're simply adjusting the sound card's mixer settings. Pretty safe to say when you're hearing instant volume changes with the other players you are only adjusting the mixer settings.

Adjust your system sound if you want to lower the volume "instantly". Foobar does things in an arguably better way.

Could you please explain why "the foobar way" is better?
My first guess, was that it had to do with the stength of the output of the soundcard.
But that doesn't really make sense to an analog signal does it?
The reason I ask is that I use the volume control on my keyboard to control system sound.
I have disabled the attenuator in foobar.

I said "arguably" better. I didn't actually say that it is better. Foobar's way is arguably better because it's consistent. It works exactly the same whether you use KS, Waveout, DS, OpenAL, or anything else. It doesn't depend on potentially buggy volume control, and it's completely independent of the system mixer.

well, one could probably say that with your sound card turned up that you'll be avoiding as much sound-card-sourced noise as possible, no? And keeping the signal as hot as possible from the card to your amp, avoiding more noise along the way.

As an aside, it would take an hour tops for someone familiar with Windows Mixer APIs to code a simple component that increases/decreases Windows' master volume.

I was thinking of doing exactly this, but sadly, I'm still deciphering the SDK and learning VC++. Give me a couple weeks (Or a couple days of no work) and I may have something.