Today, all day actually, I had disappearing sound from Firefox and VLC player. The only other thing I tested was winamp, but that always worked. So what happened today was that periodically the sound disappeared from Youtube videos and the series I watch via VLC. I checked all the audio settings and nothing was muted, not that I had set anything today and misclicked or anything... so I was puzzled. I don't know what I did that might have incurred it, but the sound came back after about 5 minutes. Now obviously this isn't a huge issue, but I can imagine it being annoying in certain cases. Since I haven't the foggiest what might have gone wrong I'm asking you techies if you know of general issues that could cause this. All my audio drivers are the same ever since first installation of Win7 about a month ago, and this has only been happening for about a week maybe. I haven't changed Direct X, or any other driver. My card is an onboard Realtek HD Audio, using Gigabyte's driver from its disk. Any help would be appreciated. edit: add SC2 to that list... wtf o.o that hasn't happened before
seeing as you are using Windows 7, you may have managed to mute the programs in the sound mixer To test this out: Open one of the programs that is muted click on the little speaker in the bottome right click "mixer" check if anything is muted. Thats the only thing i can think of, I hope it helps
Ah~~~ that might not solve the problem. Sometimes another kind of fix is required... To test to see if what I think it might be is the problem, first rename firefox.exe (or another silent app) to something else, like firefox1.exe If sound comes back first change the file name back, then we'll have to do some digging with regedit... The problem has to do with how Wow64 handles 32-bit apps. To fix this problem (if that's what it is) is to go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\LowRegistry\Audio\PolicyConfig\PropertyStore. Delete the entire PropertyStore folder entries. You can confirm you've found the culprit by searching for whatever EXE you renamed, this is the only location in the registry it should show up. This will delete all of your custom volume settings. Sometimes, apps get permanently muted for no reason at all, it's a freak Windows issue. I had to do this to get a Doom engine to give me sound again. Adjust the individual settings in the sound manager didn't fix anything. This normally happens with a 64-bit OS like Vista64 or Win7-64.
Daemon, I checked all the volume settings, that's not it. Xev, my OS is 64-bit so I'll definitely look into what you put there. I'm guessing I'll have to do this when it goes mute again? The thing is, when it happened I googled for it obviously and some generic help page suggested to check a video (FF promotion), and that had sound... but not Youtube... so I was thinking it might be a plugin (YT) and codec (VLC) thing - in fact a sound card driver thing that fails sometimes on these 2 (more like 3 with SC, which is 32-bit AFAIK) things. Anyway, I'll try that, thanks.
Using google, its a freakn' hard issue (if its the one I suggested) to find this resolution too. I had to search for days to find it. It was frustrating. Normally the app goes mute permanently and won't come back until this registry solution is tried.
I'm positive it's got something to do with Winamp - if I close it and restart the silent application everything is fixed. I haven't got round to trying your solution just yet and I won't be able to for another good week, but it's on my to-do list. I just need to be in the mood to sit down and fiddle around :err:
