Windows 11 Microphone Access Settings: Disable globally, enable by app

Hello!

I'm trying to find a way to globally disable the microphone, except for a few "desktop apps" that I want to enable.

So, I guess that means I'll be using a registry flag to force an app to get access while the global windows setting looks like this:


Is this something that's viable to achieve in windows 11, or have they hard coded things in a way that makes my life hell (like usual)? And if it is viable, how would I go about doing it, as I'm still pretty inexperienced when it comes to registry entries.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Using RegistryChangesView, we can find the recent changes after we allow specific Apps access to the Microphone:


LastSetTime is a UTC timestamp written in little-endian (reverse) byte format.

The actual timestamp isn't really relevant, other than UWP apps always leave a timestamp associated to the last registry update. Every key needs a timestamp, but Windows doesn't care about the actual value.

To enable access for any of the UWP apps, you would follow this template:

To disable access for any of the named Apps:

After applying the reg changes, you may need to switch out of the Settings app and return to refresh the view.

Thanks for the answer, and the useful tool to mess with! That's going to make finding the settings I need to mess with a lot easier.

I've played around with those values, and they do work to toggle the switch on the apps (even when one isn't normally present), but that still requires the global settings to be enabled. In short, everything I don't explicitly add a deny to will still be allowed (or at least, I'll get a prompt for it). To elaborate on the use case, I frequently play MMOs of various types, and with the occasionally daily, usually monthly, patches and updates, they generate a lot of new registry keys and entries. Keeping up on that would be yet another chore to accomplish, and I have too many of those already. It'd be much easier to allow Teams, Zoom, and Discord (the only three programs that should ever have microphone access on my PC) and globally deny all newly installed software. I just can't find a toggle to allow a global deny with exceptions. Windows, at least by default, only has a binary "everything or nothing" toggle unless you track down every registry entry and put the deny flag in there (which I didn't know where to find, so thanks again for that ^.^).