Sound randomly dissapearing

jumpstylerz

Hey icrontic,
Today I was playing some tribes ascend when my sound randomly cut out, no warning or error messege, nothing just all sound stopped working. I have checked the ports at the back and they are all fine and I have also reinstalled/updated my soundcard drivers. The only way I have found to temporarily fix it is to restart my computer, but it has happened 4 times now and is rather annoying when you are trying to game. I have also tried the sound card in different ports and nothing changed, still had a problem, I also tried it in another computer and it was fine, no stopping or anything, so I don't think it's the card.

I put it under PC hardware because I'm assuming it's a hardware problem.
Any help would be awesome
Thanks
-jumpstylerz

[EDIT] From what I can gather, it's only when I'm playing a game, if I shut it down and wait a bit then sound comes back [/EDIT]
[EDIT 2] Also in my volume mixer it shows no sounds even when playing music with itunes or something so it's not my speakers or my card itself[/EDIT]

jumpstylerz

Alright literally as I was typing this my sound came back again... I'm confused.

shwaip

Does it happen if you try different speakers/headphones?

jumpstylerz

I have only tried with my ipod headphones and my laptop speakers and same either way

jumpstylerz

I also now for some reason can't watch any more than 11 seconds at a time of a youtube video or listen to music through itunes.... My sound also hasn't returned after playing BF3, I will restart and see if it fixes itself for now.

jumpstylerz

Alright it has now stopped working completely, but if I select my sound device to be through my TV (HDMI through graphics card) it works on my TV with no fails or errors, although this will work for now, I am getting a 7.1 headset this week so I kind of need it fixed for them.

Tushon

Uninstall drivers, download new drivers, install.

jumpstylerz

Tushon said:

Uninstall drivers, download new drivers, install.

I had already tried that. It was one of the first things I tried

Tushon

I guess I missed that when reading. Derp.

I mean, you said you tried it in different slots on one computer and it continued having issues but didn't present in the other PC. It would seem that the issue lies with either Windows (or some driver) or mobo. I'd check on any mobo related drivers as well and test the card in that PC with a Ubuntu or other live CD type setup to see if you can reproduce the issue.

Tushon

Maybe try what @theothernewguy posted here:

1) Right click sound icon and click Playback Properties
2) Double click the one with the green check and go to the Enhancements tab
3) Check 'Disable all sound enhancements'

This completely made the stuttering disappear. Thought I would share this.

jumpstylerz

I'll give it a try, I have heard on the grape vine that some sound cards, particularly soundblasters have problems and conflicts with vista and 7 so it could be that too.

RootWyrm

Are you using Chrome?
If so: that's the cause. 20.0.1132.57m will randomly hijack sound improperly, breaking it. 20.0.1180.60m doesn't appear to have a fix for it either.

jumpstylerz

Yeah I'm using chrome, so you are saying I should just go back to using firefox and it should fix itself?

Straight_Man

Firefox does not hijack sound in version 14. In fact, have never heard of firefox hijacking sound or experienced that happening.

RootWyrm

jumpstylerz said:

Yeah I'm using chrome, so you are saying I should just go back to using firefox and it should fix itself?

Eyup. Switching back will most likely fix it. Firefox is not affected.

Near as I can tell, it's a bug in the Flash crap embedded in Chrome yet again. (That version also has twice randomly started autoplaying videos with absolutely no way to stop them short of killing the process.) I also successfully duplicated in a VM and on my laptop, so it's definitely Chrome itself. Might be related to specific page content or specific sites - I didn't bother to test that. I just wanted my damn music back.

jumpstylerz

Lol yeah, could it maybe be a problem with one of the extensions? Perhaps adblocker? I really like the usability of chrome and am hesitant to switch back

jumpstylerz

Straight_Man said:

Firefox does not hijack sound in version 14. In fact, have never heard of firefox hijacking sound or experienced that happening.

I never said firefox had a problem with sound, it's that firefox is less stable and user friendly then chrome, and is very memory hungry

PirateNinja

It's not a problem with extensions, it's a problem with Chrome and likely Flash as Root said. I have an extension free Chrome install, and I have the problem too. Try loading Pandora in Chrome, then pull a usb storage device out of your computer without properly ejecting it first. You lose sound completely in Chrome. It's ridiculous.
If I want stable browsing that doesn't report what I do to our Google overlords, I use FireFox. It works better and I don't care if it uses 100mb more memory. That's just my experience though.

Straight_Man

And, folks who code Firefox are working hard to lower its base memory footprint. More is available as optional modules now, plugins. You CAN choose what plugins you need to a large extent. Plugins running take RAM space to be loaded and/or running and Windows sees them as part of Firefox's memory use.

Adobe is having to fairly often release new Flash versions to handle security problems and some function problems, yes. Chrome can use Adobe Flash, but it in current versions has its own Flash file handling that is NOT licensed from Adobe and which is buggy. Core problem is buggy, in-development Flash file playing code that is internal to Chrome.

Note that were Chrome to use only Adobe Flash code in handling Flash files internal to itself, Chrome's devs would have a licensing issue with Adobe or have to write a Flash module code supporting set to allow Adobe Flash plugin to load-- Chrome is trying to write their own uniquely coded module set for Flash. Firefox has plugin handling code Adobe supports, so Firefox uses Adobe Flash plugin. Free to the end user.

John.

jumpstylerz

Ah yep I see. It's just more annoying with firefox that I can't just install extensions right from the get go and I have to get grease monkey. So far after restarting my PC a few days ago I have yet to have the problem so I think it's fixed itself for now, if it happens again I'll switch back for the time being until google come up with a solution. With the memory issue though, I tend to not have the memory to spare and in games like battlefield 3 that need the browser running to play it becomes an issue. For instance when I switched to chrome my performance on ultra increased by a good 20+ frames and I can now play it on that setting instead of just high.

Straight_Man

RAM is by far the CHEAPEST upgrade to make in a system. If you can find Crucial.com, look up your system or motherboard in its RAM finder, they guarantee the RAM they sell from the RAM finder will be compatible. If you want to cross-price, to find cheaper RAM, the RAM specs given by the finder will let you search for that kind of RAM on Newegg. I have a laptop with 16 GB RAM in it for example-- it is my workhorse computer. I do some semi-graphic-intense stuff on it. and run lots of programs at once.

As to the installing of extensions, firefox 14 has extension addon and plugin support and installation built in, Since I use it, and some others also do, I can quickly tell you how to install those without Greasemonkey as an addon if you want to know..