Screen blanking shortcut

[abt]

It's a well known tip that if you turn off your screen while mixing you can hear a whole bunch of things that your eyes can trick you into missing (mix with your ears not your eyes). So here's my tip for blanking out your screen without having to turn it on and off all the time.

These instructions are for Windows 7 but you should be able to come up with the same sort of thing for just about any system.

All I've done is create a taskbar shourtcut that opens a blank screen saver. I click on the shortcut and the screen goes black. Move the mouse and it goes way.

For Windows 7 make a desktop shortcut that points to:

C:\Windows\explorer.exe C:\Windows\System32\scrnsave.scr

You can then drag and drop this on the taskbar so you can get to it easily from your daw.

 

[He's Dead, Jim]

I have this cool hack to do that too. It's called "closing your eyes"

 

[abt]

I have this cool hack to do that too. It's called "closing your eyes"

Haha! Yeah, but that will make most people, including myself get very tired.

 

[He's Dead, Jim]

Haha! Yeah, but that will make most people, including myself get very tired.

Just joking. That is an excellent tip.

 

[abt]

Just joking. That is an excellent tip.

We're cool dude, I know you were joking! Seriously, turn my monitor on and off was driving me nuts.

 

[botus99]

Excellent tip! I'll have to start trying this out

 

[JeffTD]

There is a 'hot corners' setting in OS X to either activate a screensaver or to turn off the display. I use it as a 'standby' mode for my iMac when it's not in constant use but also for this.

 

[java]

tried! excellent tip!!

 

[Kohugaly]

and the best thing is, the shortcut has the same icon as explorer... guess what I do now... use blue-screen animation as screen saver LOOOOOL :-D

 

[abt]

Haha. Yeah, I didn't mention you can use any screen saver you want. Maybe your studio logo, get a bit of subliminal advertising to the client. You can easily change the icon if you want.

@Jeff. Good tip. On my Mac mini the hot corners are terrible, I have to move the mouse there a few times to get it to work. It's not my daw so I'm not bothered.

 

[Nimvi]

and the best thing is, the shortcut has the same icon as explorer... guess what I do now... use blue-screen animation as screen saver LOOOOOL :-D

Fun to pull on your clients after they nail that perfect take

 

[KHE]

tried it, but it opens the text-editor... win7 32-bit... any hints?
thanks!

 

[abt]

First I'd search for explorer.exe *.scr to make sure the paths are correct and that scrnsave.scr exists. I say *.scr so you get a list of all the screen savers that are available. If they exist and the paths exist try making a shortcut to C:\Windows\System32\scrnsave.scr only and see if that works. I do have another method to do this that uses a .vbs script which I didn't post because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

 

[KHE]

hi abt,

thanks a lot! works now... in my case, *.scr-files were assigned to a image/drawning-program! changed that, now it works!
thanks!

 

[waltz mastering]

On a Mac control>shift>eject will black out the screen and hitting any key or moving the mouse will bring it back.