Powersound, bring the act of charging your battery to life!

Introduction


Ever wished your Windows laptop would play a sound when you connect and disconnect the charger? Powersound is a simple tool that does just that.

While the NVDA screen reader already has an add-on to achieve this, it is merely capable of producing a beep. Powersound, however, can use any sound you want, as long as it is in wave format and named properly. Furthermore, Powersound is screen reader independent, and can even run without a screen reader. It can also have certain information spoken through a running screen reader and connected braille display. Or, if no screen reader is running or you're using Windows Narrator, it will use the built-in speech engine in Windows.

Powersound runs entirely in the background and is controlled by global hotkeys, meaning it can be controlled from anywhere within the Windows OS. These hotkeys can be modified at any time, useful if another program you have running is causing hotkey conflicts.

Requirements


You need a laptop with Windows 7 or higher to run Powersound. It will not run on desktops as they don't have a battery. If you want braille feedback as well as speech output with your screen reader, you will need compatible braille display hardware. See your screen reader's documentation for a list of supported braille displays.

Download


The highest version of Powersound is V 1.0, compiled on Wednesday, January 15th, 2025.

Download the latest version of Powersound

Setup and usage


  1. Extract the Powersound zip file you downloaded to a location of your choice.
  2. Navigate to the extracted folder and run powersound.exe. If file extensions aren't set to be shown on your system, the filename will just be powersound.

Powersound will then sit quietly, out of sight and out of mind, waiting to alert you with a bling whenever you plug in or unplug your laptop's charger.

Hotkeys


Note: Windows + Shift is the default modifier for Powersound's hotkeys. Therefore, from here on out, it will be known as Powermod.

The charge monitor


The charge monitor, turned off by default, will monitor your laptop's charge level and alert you with both sound and speech when the battery hits 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% charge. This works either charging or discharging, but you might find it most useful when charging. This feature can be toggled on and off with Powermod C.

Modifying hotkeys


  1. If Powersound is running, shut it down either with Powermod Q or through Task Manager.
  2. Navigate to your Powersound folder and open the keys.ini file in your text editor of choice.
  3. Change the corresponding hotkey lines to your liking, then save the file.
  4. Close the text editor and relaunch Powersound.

Supporting Seediffusion


Powersound is free of charge (ha ha ha) but donations to help keep Seediffusion going and support project development are highly appreciated.

If you can't give financial support, sharing around also helps. :)