Audacity Forum

Hello,
I downloaded audacity to convert a file from wav to mp3. When i did the "export as mp3" it asked me about the lame encoder .dll, so i clicked cancel and decided i would look for it later. Immediately after doing this, i had no more audio on my computer. I went to check the master volume settings (control pannel -> sound) and noticed everything grayed out for sound output. Before i did this everything worked 100%, in fact it was a fairly new installation of windows (about 3 weeks).

I then went to get the lame mp3 dll as the instructions say to do on the wiki, but it did not fix it.

It has been several days now and nothing seems to fix this problem and i need my audio back desperately.

Details:
OS: Windows XP pro SP3
Soundcard: built-in motherboard thingy on an asus A8N-SLI Deluxe board. computer is custom built.
Audacity ver.: The latest stable one as of this post.

Things I have tried:
1 - Numerous restarts.

2 - Enabling/disabling the on board sound device via BIOS.

3 - checking the status in device manager, everything looks fine (no ? or ! or red X's on anything under audio). Checked with dxdiag and all the stuff in audio is blank (shows the titles for each bit of info, but there is no info), and doesn't detect any audio device.

4 - Removed/installed manufacturer-provided drivers several times.

5 - removed/installed third-party codecs that i had on my system (using k-lite codec pack, currently none are installed).

6 - uninstalled audacity, then reinstalled with the lame mp3 encoder and tried to encode. The encoding was a success, but it didn't fix the audio device. The Audio I/O in preferences is useless, can not choose a sound device or use any of the dropdown menus.

7 - I also tried with speakers, with headphones, and with headphones plugged into the jack on the speakers, none worked.


I'm getting very frustrated now since i've tried just about everything i managed to find on google, so i figured i'd ask here as a last resort.

Since this is a custom built computer, you must have an old sound card in the garage you could try in place of the existing one. No doubt the new one has hot and cold running beer, but just to prove the system, putting a known older simple one in might prove useful.

It's remotely possible Audacity has nothing to do with the failure and the sound card just went toes up on its own. Since neither Windows nor BIOS can find a sound device, there might not be one there any more. Shut down, pull it out, inspect it, and reseat it.

Another way-out-there item is Audacity tends to stress computers. It uses all the memory all the way up and if there's anything wrong with one of those high sticks, Audacity will find it and appear to create all sorts of damage, when in fact, it's just the OS suddenly realizing it has internal cancer.

I don't believe any of that, but you seem to have gone through all the software steps with no result.

Do you let the computer do a memory check on startup? Most people turn that off now, but I leave it running (slow boot) on all my machines. They're all custom, too.

Koz

The sound card is an on-board one, built into the motherboard. I don't have any other ones, never needed one since i don't do any professional audio stuff and don't use my pc for high def media.

Memory test turned out fine. all 3gb working as it should.

The bios doesn't complain about the sound device. I can enable or disable the onboard card just fine.

One thing i can do is dual boot into windows server 2003 which i already have set up and install the manufacturer drivers there, see if i get any audio. If i do then i'll highly suspect audacity did something evil on my XP setup.

Maybe it had help. Do you use Skype?

Koz

Pretty sure it's on the software end now. Sound worked fine on server 2k3.
I managed to get sound working on XP somehow but got a blue screen a few seconds after any audio played, and now it's dead again and back to square one.

<<<Sound worked fine on server 2k3.>>>

Did you install your Skype on 2K3?

Koz

Dear Chunlix.

Bunch of things for you to try. Computer troubleshooting is all about elimination - go through a list, cross out all the ideas that are O.K. and hopefully you'll just be left with the answer to the problem. The following are all I'd try if I was in your position. This has happened to me before now, I've got a soundcard (M-Audio Audiophile 2496) but I think that's irrelevant for this.

First thing to try. Fire up Audacity. Then double-click on an MP3 so you've got something playing - I know you can't hear it, bear with me. Once you know the MP3's playing, press RECORD on Audacity. If you get a wiggly line showing up (dunno the proper word for it!) it means Audacity's found the sound and is recording it. Which means the sound's travelling through the internal system fine, which means the soundcard on the motherboard's working fine. It's just the output to your speaker's has gone AWOL.

Audacity's seemingly 'killed' my sound a couple of times, but both times I've gone into START/All Programs/Accessories/Entertinment/VolumeControl/Options/Properties and discovered the wrong device was selected in the 'Mixer Device' letterbox. Now for my soundcard it has to be 'Mon Mixer', which means Monitor Mixer, which is the bit of driver software that looks at all the sounds that are happening on the computer as a whole. What the equivalent would be for your motherboard I have no idea, but if you go there and click on the black arrowhead by the little letterbox window, you might find a few different ones you can try out. If you were getting the wiggly line on record, it's the PLAYBACK device you've got to check out. Chances are the device itself is OK, it's just come unselected. If there's a few to choose from, try them all. NOT making the dumbass mistake I made, which was to think none of them were working when actually I'd just chosen a short MP3 which had stopped playing before I'd reached the end of the list!! (Make sure the MP3's actually still playing in between trying different ones out, in other words.)

If you're not getting the wiggly line, (the scientific word for that's 'oscilloscope', but I don't know if Audacity counts as one of those, quite) then try out different settings in the RECORD box. Again, make sure the MP3's not run out. On mine, when the right one's selected the wiggly line suddenly appears from nowhere.

In Control Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices/Hardware tab there's a Voice Recording and Voice Playback pair of windows. Forget the word 'voice', that just means 'microphone' - they ASSUME people only ever speak into microphones. Check the right things are selected in those. They should be the same in there as in the START/All Programs?Accessories.... location mentioned above.

The Blue Screen of Death USUALLY means conflicts. It CAN mean naff memory, it CAN meen motherboard problems (DON'T PANIC - that's the least likely one!) but usually it's conflichts IMHO. Have you installed anything else recently? Games cause conflicts sometimes, even if they're not running at that precise moment the conflict can still be there (strange but true. It's the installed part of the game, not the part that's still on the CD!) If you have, whatever it is, uninstall it. I'd get a proper uninstaller like Total Uninstall because that cleans out all the registry changes that the program's uninstaller usually leaves behind. Hopefully, you'll suddenly get the sound back - and no Blue Screen!!

Doin't forget the F8 key on startup. (That's on the row on the top of the keyboard.) Tapping that as the computer's booting will take you to a Safe List of startup options. One of them will read something VERY similar to 'Last Good Configuration'. That's a compressed file of all the saved instructions from the time immediately preceding any new software you added/deleted. Try rolling back (selecting) that one. Hopefully, it will take your computer back to a halcyon time when everything actually worked properly. It can't make anything any worse anyway and it's worth a try!

MSCONFIG. Go to Start/Run. Type in MSCONFIG and press RETURN. This will fire up the System Configuration Utility. The reason you're doing this is just incase anything new that's starting up automatically when you turn the computer on is conflicting with the soundcard settings somehow. So click on Startup, then click in the little tickbox labelled 'Hide All Microsoft Services' down the bottom of the tiny window. De-select whatever's showing after the Microsoft services have been hidden. Then restart the computer. You'll prob. get a little grey screen coming up saying you've made changes to MSCONFIG, do you want to go back to how it was? The answer to that one is NO! And you don't want it to show that little grey window when the computer starts, either. After all, you can always run MSCONFIG again to re-tick everything. Try the sound. If it's working, something in the startup list was conflicting. From there on in, it's a process of elimination - check something in the MSCONFIG startup list, restart the computer, try a sound out, try checking something else if that didn't work... If you go through the whole list and nothing makes any difference, at least you've eliminated those possibilities.

That's what I would do to begin with. Tell me what happens. If nothing, I'll think of some more ideas - they're my strong point!!

Yours sonically

ulrichburke

Wouldn't mind an answer on that Skype question. Skype works by viciously grabbing sound pathways and sometimes it doesn't put them back when it's done.

Koz

I'm sorry, I don't know the first thing about Skype, I'm afraid I've never used it.

Yours respectfully

ulrichburke

Audacity killed my sound system as well.
operating Linux 8.04
Can get sound through Audacity.
All other software will not play a thing.
Loaded Audacity.
Used it to translate a digital audio file and then the sound system shut down except for playing an audio file through Audacity.

_______
bert