my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
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@gsuberland @0xabad1dea I had that experience in Win10 entirely without third party nonsenseware, by owning two laptops, one with a US keyboard, one with GB keyboard and Microsoft decided to turn on "sync settings" on both, resulting in each laptop always switching to the wrong keyboard. Took me ages to turn that off as the setting also synched, then they changed how settings worked and it started doing it again…
@synx508 @0xabad1dea oof. I've probably lucked out on that by refusing to set up a cloud account for login, but obviously that's not always feasible
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@0xabad1dea Audio in Windows is so incredibly confusing. I know the system quite well, but it doesn't "fit in my head", so every time something goes wrong I have to rediscover it all over again, get confused, and then after 20 minutes remember "oh right, there's a second control panel that looks almost like this one, but subtly different". Also they change it every six months anyway.
@0xabad1dea Anyway, the likely answer (sorry if you already tried this):
Windows button, type "sound", select "manage sound output devices". Go into the sound device you want from the list and click "Set as default sound device". If that option doesn't exist, it's because it's already set (so they hide it? What?), and the fix may be to set ANOTHER device as default, then go back and re-set the one you wanted as default.
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@WizardOfDocs no, no, this was the fourth or fifth reboot; turning it on and off again did not work. turning it on and off again **without the usb microphone that should be conceptually unrelated to the 3.5mm headphones** worked.
@0xabad1dea oh. Yikes.
This is still Microsoft's fault, right? -
@0xabad1dea oh. Yikes.
This is still Microsoft's fault, right?@WizardOfDocs the audio thing is not necessarily Microsoft's fault as opposed to shoddy drivers not provided by them etc etc. but replacing the audio troubleshoot button with an app that says to click the audio troubleshoot button definitely is their fault
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@0xabad1dea Audio in Windows is so incredibly confusing. I know the system quite well, but it doesn't "fit in my head", so every time something goes wrong I have to rediscover it all over again, get confused, and then after 20 minutes remember "oh right, there's a second control panel that looks almost like this one, but subtly different". Also they change it every six months anyway.
@TomF @0xabad1dea imo the audio architecture under the hood isn't terribly difficult to follow (unless you're doing stuff with KS, which does get pretty involved), but the entire user-facing frontend portion is an unfinished spaghetti mess that defies discoverability.
well, I guess that statement is applicable to the entire settings UX right now, but the audio one is particularly egregious. networking is a close second.
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
@0xabad1dea Yeah, the new troubleshooting app is worse than useless. The old troubleshooters at least sometimes worked, this one just insults your intelligence.
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@0xabad1dea in the end I modified the DACL on the registry key so it couldn't touch it.
@gsuberland @0xabad1dea I've got a Xonar U7 MK II, and at some point a process its support app runs started popping up a crash dialog at every login. I tried deleting the program first, but that caused a different error, then I put it back and modified ACLs so it can't run. Problem solved.
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
@0xabad1dea Windows 11 'features' like this is why i switched my daily driver computer from windows 11 to macos. Not ideal, but better.
i also sometimes see the harddrive light going a rapid pace (SSD), and the computer is very non-responsive. i close down every one of my apps, and it still is saturating the computer. Open task manager (which takes minutes), and magically it is running fine. Almost like some MS apps / services are running like malware and shutdown when task manager is open. I do not trust.
yes - i try to keep task manager running all of the time on my win11 computer now.
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@0xabad1dea
It took me a while on Linux to figure out that I could disable outputs in pulseaudio, and thus stop my USB microphone from insisting every time it was plugged in that it should be the audio *output* device used by the system.@viq @0xabad1dea Of course, Linux solves this problem by a) just not having audio work at all or b) requiring you recompile the entire audio stack from the source or c) making you find a single Stack Overflow post from 2019 telling you to ‘simply enter the command SUDO SUCKIT AUDIO.PY’ into a terminal window
/s
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
@0xabad1dea anyone recommending Linux to solve audio problems would definitely be trolling.
Alsa stays broken between reboots.
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
@0xabad1dea FYI if it happens again, save a reboot and just restart the Windows Audio Endpoint Builder service. That'll probably sort it out. Had a machine that I needed to do that every login (for real... I ended up making a scheduled task do it as a part logging in)
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@viq @0xabad1dea Of course, Linux solves this problem by a) just not having audio work at all or b) requiring you recompile the entire audio stack from the source or c) making you find a single Stack Overflow post from 2019 telling you to ‘simply enter the command SUDO SUCKIT AUDIO.PY’ into a terminal window
/s
@davidbcohen I've been really fortunate recently. All my audio devices have Just Worked on Linux when and how I wanted them to, including some Bluetooth devices that Windows 10 refused to handle at all.
I am aware that this isn't a typical experience, do you can imagine my surprise.
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@davidbcohen I've been really fortunate recently. All my audio devices have Just Worked on Linux when and how I wanted them to, including some Bluetooth devices that Windows 10 refused to handle at all.
I am aware that this isn't a typical experience, do you can imagine my surprise.
@krans @viq @0xabad1dea You are blessed. While you have that much luck you might want to enter the lottery!
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@krans @viq @0xabad1dea You are blessed. While you have that much luck you might want to enter the lottery!
@davidbcohen I can confidently assure you that the universe has already extracted payment
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
@0xabad1dea I remember the times when the OS would recognize the moment you put something on the 3.5 jack.
It looked like magic to me.I miss XP and W7
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
@0xabad1dea Just install Linux, because that will get your mind off whatever problem you were trying to solve.
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange I got my eldest daughter a set of good wireless headphones that have two connection possibilities, digital optical or 3.5mm. We had only the optical cable connected. Nevertheless, Windows 10 just decided one day that henceforth it would use the 3.5mm connection.
It took us several days to figure out what Windows had done, and several more to get it back to using the optical link again. The manufacturer's support was completely unhelpful and kept giving us instructions containing settings dialog options that we'd repeatedly told them didn't exist. (I think what we ended up doing was uninstalling all the drivers, completely disconnecting the device, cold rebooting, then doing a brand new clean installation.) -
my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
Your headphones will work on Linux!
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my husband's new Windows 11 computer suddenly stopped outputting audio to the 3.5mm headphones.
I clicked the audio troubleshooting button in Settings. It did not send me to the troubleshooter, but instead redirected me to install a help app. (yes, it wasn't even pre-installed.)
The help app told me to click the audio troubleshooter button.
Satya Nadella owes me three billion dollars in emotional damages.
(we've fixed the audio problem by unplugging the USB microphone and rebooting. before you @ me self-righteously about someone else's operating system which was chosen in accordance with THEIR needs and not mine and certainly not yours, consider whether I might react with the fury of ten thousand suns)
Look, audio often isn't great on Linux either. Colleague of mine regularly comes to a video conference, hears nothing, leaves again. Scolds, stops all programmes that have looked askance at any audio stuff in the last 24 hours and then rejoins the meeting.
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@0xabad1dea Just install Linux, because that will get your mind off whatever problem you were trying to solve.
@mattblaze @0xabad1dea You'll get so many new, more interesting problems
