title: How to globally mute and unmute sound in Vista and 7, and to get a mute state?
body: <p>I'm using the old good Mixer API right now, but it does not work as expected on Windows Vista &amp; 7 in the normal, not in XP compatibility mode. It mutes the sound for the current app only, but I need a global (hardware) mute. How to rearch the goal? Is there any way to code this w/o COM interfaces and strange calls, in pure C/C++?</p>