Toggling mute on Mac OS X with non-Mac Keyboards and Alfred

I recently switched keyboards and picked up a daskeyboard professional (model-s). This is a really nice (and satisfying) mechanical keyboard, which I really like. However, das only makes a Windows version of the keyboard, and I am running Mac OS X. In general, this isn’t an issue, as I was able to remap control keys to be in the right position, but I really missed being able to quickly toggle whether the system volume is muted.

I could probably use an app such as DoubleCommand to remap one of the function keys to the mute key, but I didn’t want to rely on on a third-party piece of software that I would have to configure each time I wanted to set up a new system. So, I decided to create a simple AppleScript Application that I could call from Alfred (or Quicksilver) that would toggle whether the volume was muted.

Here is the script:

set volumeSettings to get volume settings
if output muted of volumeSettings is false then
    set volume with output muted
else
    set volume without output muted
end if

Download Source and Application from my GitHub account.

To use this, download the application (or compile the script). Save the application in a place where Alfred / Quicksilver can find it. I placed mine in my /Applications folder.

Now, when you want to toggle whether the volume is muted, just launch Alfred / Quicksilver and type mute.

I know its a pretty simple solution, but I wanted to share it, and post it here for future reference. If you have any suggestions or a better solution, post them in the comments.