Microsoft takes another step toward replacing the Control Panel

How much do you prefer the Control Panel over the more modern Settings app? Personally, I have a strange attachment to the Control Panel, even though plenty of people prefer the more streamlined Settings page and Microsoft seems to be getting ready to kill it off eventually. While Microsoft hasn’t pulled the trigger yet, there have been signs that the company is slowly phasing out the archaic tool in favor of handling everything within Settings.

Microsoft is working on a new “Soundscape” panel for Settings

This discovery was made by PhantomOfEarth on X, who has dug up plenty of preview features in the past and shows no sign of slowing down. PhantomOfEarth pours over every Windows preview build and hunts for any features that are still a work in progress, even ones hidden behind variables that they have to manually find and enable. This time, PhantomOfEarth has spotted an interesting new page titled “Soundscape”:

This new feature replaces a link to the Control Panel in the Settings page. Right now, if you boot up Windows 11, and then navigate to Settings > System > Sound, you should see an entry titled “More sound settings” under the Advanced section. If you click that entry, the Control panel should boot up and show you the Sound settings.

In the newest preview build, it seems that this option is replaced by an entry titled “Soundscape,” which leads to another Settings page. This will presumably take over the reliance on the Control Panel and allow people to tweak the same options within the sleeker Settings UI.

So, what’s hidden within this mysterious Soundscape section? Turns out, there’s not a lot in there right now. It’s highly likely that this is Microsoft designing the landing page before filling it up with settings later on. However, the option to open Soundscape describes it as “Startup sound, scheme, audio events,” so it’ll likely replace the “Sounds” tab in the Sounds Control Panel where you can adjust system sounds.