No Audio Output in Vista

Not getting any sound? First be sure that your audio playback device is properly installed by right clicking on the volume icon (by default this is found at the bottom right by the time in the notification area). Select “Playback Devices” and you should see a list of valid output devices. You may have only one, but you should have at least one. You should see a little green circle with a checkmark and a status of “Working” following the description of the device.

If you do not see any devices, you’ll need to install one. This is normally a driver issue, so installing the proper driver should do the trick. You can also check out the “Device Manager” by pressing the “Start orb” and typing “Device Manager” in the search box, if it is on top you can hit enter– otherwise click it from the search results to start it up. If you see any question mark icons in this tree, they indicate hardware problems. For sound to work, you should see at least one sound device under “Sound, video and game controllers” such as “High Definition Audio Device”. If you double-click on it you should see the device status as “This device is working properly.”

At this stage we will assume you have a working audio device and you are facing a configuration issue of some kind. There are a couple of possibilities worth discussing…

1) The volume for the application is too low or muted.

First start the application with which you are having audio issues. In Vista, audio can be adjusted on a per application basis. So take a look at the volume mixer by clicking the volume icon at the bottom left of your screen in the notification area (by the time) and clicking the “mixer” link. Here you should see the volume settings for running applications. When muted, you’ll see the little circle with a line through it icon in the volume button at the bottom of the slider control and it may be “blacked out” to further show it is not on. Clicking the volume button at the bottom of each slider flips the application between mute on and off. Ensure the volume is set appropriately for the application in question.

2) The volume is routed to another playback device.

If you have more than one playback device, the volume might be going to the wrong one. You should see activity in the Sound Playback tab where we looked at the available playback devices earlier– there is a live level indicator here. If you see that the wrong device is getting the output from your application, select the desired playback device and press “Set Default” to change it. This default actually applies to any running applications, so it can get confusing when some applications have one default playback devices and others are set to something else. Just keep in mind that when you set the default playback device it will apply to the list of running applications you see in the mixer and not to any others that may already have a different device set as default.

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