Microsoft is bringing a modernized audio mixer to Windows 11, and Windows Insiders are getting an early peek starting today. Microsoft is now rolling out Windows 11 build 25309 to Insiders in the Dev channel, which includes this new audio mixer, along with improvements to voice access and color management.
New audio mixer in Quick Settings
Microsoft has been slowly but surely transitioning more Ui elements from outdated design languages to the more modern Windows 11 look, and this time, it's the audio mixer that's finally being modernized. This allows you to change the volume of individual apps on specific playback devices connected to your PC. Now, you can find the audio mixer inside the quick settings panel, which is opened by clicking the audio icon on the right of the taskbar. In addition to changing the volume for each app, the audio mixer lets you switch between spatial sound technologies more quickly.
To be fair, Microsoft has previously modernized the audio mixer, but it was only available in the Settings app, so it wasn't the most intuitive process to get there, especially compared to the audio mixer in previous versions of Windows. This is much more accessible, and Microsoft is even adding a new keyboard shortcut (Windows + Ctrl + V) to bring up the audio mixer even faster. This new audio mixer is only available to select Insiders, so you may not see it right away.
Auto Color Management for more monitors
Another big improvement in this release is expanded support for auto color management on most displays. Previously, this feature was available for specific displays that were meant to support the feature, but now, you can enable it for just about any monitor you have to ensure colors are displayed consistently across different monitors.
the only requirement is having a relatively modern GPU that supports WDDM 3.0, and most panels can benefit from this feature, though Microsoft warns it will be more beneficial on monitors that support 10-bit color and have color gamuts wider than sRGB. You can enable Auto Color Management in the Settings app under System > Display > Advanced display.
Voice access improvements
For users relying on voice access to use your computer, there's some good news in this build, too. For starters, just like Live Captions did a couple of weeks ago, voice access now supports different English dialects, not just US English. What's more Microsoft has greatly improved the list of commands you can use for selecting and editing text, make it easier to write using your voice.
Starting with this build, the Search bar on the taskbar, as well as widgets icons will respond differently depending on the theme you have set on your PC. You'll now see a lighter search bar if you use a custom-colored taskbar, as well as if you're using a dark theme for Windows but a light theme for apps. As for widgets, the weather icons displayed on the taskbar now have slightly different colors so you get better contrast and visibility depending on the theme you're using.
Other improvements and changes
Aside from these more notable improvements, Microsoft has also made a few changes. For one thing, the company has brought back the new dropdown menu that lets you select the touch keyboard behavior, so it never appears automatically, always appears automatically, or only when there's no physical keyboard attached. Similarly, the design tweaks for Snap Layouts are now available again after being removed from the previous build. There are also new options in the Settings app for when you press the power button or close the lid on your computer, bringing over more options from the old control panel.
Microsoft has also further tweaked the messaging in the Start menu for when certain actions are required on your Microsoft account. Additionally, the "second-chance out of box experience" is now more personalized. This experience shows up if you didn't enable all the features Microsoft suggests during the initial set up, like setting up Phone Link or enabling Windows Hello. Microsoft is also now showing a new pizza icon in File Explorer to indicate that this version is now based on the Windows App SDK and WinUI 3, though functionality remains the same.
Meanwhile, the new Windows Spotlight experience that began testing a few builds ago has been temporarily disabled due to some issues.
Aside from all of this, this build also includes the usual array of fixes and known issues. The list of fixes is fairly long, and it includes a long-awaited fix for Windows Hello facial recognition of Arm64 devices, which should be functional again. Here's the full list:
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Fixed an issue causing USB devices (including keyboard and mouse) to not work for some Insiders after upgrading to Build 25295+.
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Fixed an issue for some Insiders where if you’d uninstalled the previous flight, it would cause your Start menu and taskbar to cyclically crash.
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Fixed an issue where when using Windows Hello to sign in with facial recognition, it may not have worked on Arm64 PCs.
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Fixed an issue with the Windows Insider Program settings page showing a newer build was available in Windows Update even though you were on the latest available build in the Dev Channel.
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Fixed multiple Explorer.exe crashes impacting taskbar and system tray.
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Fixed a display issue that could result in the taskbar appearing duplicated when making resolution changes.
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Fixed an issue which was causing app icons on the taskbar to appear on the wrong monitor for some Insiders with multiple monitors.
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We fixed an issue where under certain circumstances third-party widgets were not loading as expected.
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Fixed rendering issues when using the touch keyboard with the search box on taskbar.
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Fixed an issue when double clicking the search highlight glyph in the search box makes it disappear.
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Fixed an issue where the search box would randomly disappear.
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Fixed an issue where the search icon flips incorrectly for right-to-left (RTL) languages.
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Fixed on issue where you might have seen some text flicker in the search box when you click into it.
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Fixed an issue where the search box might disappear on one monitor if you are using multiple monitors.
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Made some accessibility fixes to the settings for search under Settings > Personalization > Taskbar.
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Fixed an issue which caused Insiders with custom desktop icon arrangements / sizes to get set back to default in the previous build.
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Fixed an underlying issue believed to be the cause of File Explorer unexpectedly jumping into the foreground sometimes.
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The “Open in new tab” context menu option and middle clicking folders will now open the tab in the background rather than switching focus.
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Fixed an issue where the close button could get stuck in a highlighted state when you moved your mouse across it.
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Fix an issue where when using the French-Canadian layout for the touch keyboard, the letters output when typing didn’t always match what was displayed on the keys.
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When using the Korean IME, CTRL + F10 should no longer open the IME context menu.
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Fixed an underlying issue believed to be the root cause of why some Insiders saw their startup app settings get reset with the previous build.
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Going to Privacy & Security > Phone Calls should no longer crash Settings.
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Fixed a high hitting DWM.exe crash in the last couple flights.
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Fixed multiple issues that were preventing some of the new live captions language models from downloading correctly.
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Fixed an underlying issue causing Insiders on Arm64 PCs to not be able to activate M365, with it citing a network issue.
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Fixed a search indexer crash.
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Fixed an underlying issue that could cause UWP apps to appear in English after upgrading although that wasn’t your display language.
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Fixed an issue which was causing .appinstaller packages to fail to install with an error message that says “The parameter is incorrect” (even though it wasn’t).
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Fixed an underlying issue causing certain cameras to not work in apps with the last flight.
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Fixed an underlying issue which was leading to Microsoft Edge crashes for some Insiders in the last few flights.
As for the known issues, you can read up on those below before you install the update:
[General]
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We are investigating an issue where some users are experiencing longer than expected update times installing recent builds. If you experienced this issue, please submit a new feedback item with logs in Feedback Hub.
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Some AAD (Azure Active Directory joined users are now seeing “Getting ready for you” screens when signing into Windows after updating the latest builds. We are investigating the issue.
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Launching Group Policy Editor may show an error about a displayName attribute not being found.
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We’re working on the fix for an issue causing the New button in Snipping Tool to not work for some Insiders after upgrading to Build 25295. If you are impacted by this, going to Settings > Apps > Default apps, and setting screen snipping as the default for ms-screenclip, it should resolve the issue.
[Live captions]
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On ARM64 devices, enhanced speech recognition support installed through the Language & Region settings page will require restarting live captions if you switch languages in the live captions Caption language menu.
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Certain languages shown on the Language & Region settings page will indicate speech recognition support (e.g., Korean) but don’t yet have support for live captions.
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When adding a language through the Language & Region settings page, language feature installation progress may become hidden, and you may not see install completion of “Enhanced speech recognition” (required by Live Captions). (You can use the language’s “Language options” to monitor progress.) If this happens, there may be an unexpected delay before the live caption setup experience detects this and lets you continue.
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The Language & Region settings page may not offer the necessary speech recognition language support for live captions for up to an hour after first login.
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Captioning performance may be degraded in non-English languages and missing out-of-language filtering in non-English (United States) languages which means that incorrect captions will be shown for speech not in the caption language.
[Voice access]
As per usual, the latest build is available to Insiders in the Dev channel by simply going to Windows Update and checking for updates. It will be installed automatically sooner rather than later, so you may want to get it at your earliest convenience. If you're not familiar with the Insider program, check out our explainer of the Windows Insider channels to learn more.
Source: Microsoft