How to reset audio on Windows?

Is there a way to reset or restart the audio (stack) of Windows without logging off or restarting the OS?

Ashwin Nanjappa

Posted 2012-08-10T06:09:29.163

Reputation: 8 705

@Bob not everyone has the time or the technical expertise to track down a root cause. hard resetting a service works well enough in a lot of cases and in any case, deeper root causes was not the question at hand. – mendota – 2016-07-17T02:29:32.340

2Why do you want to do this? What are you trying to accomplish? The 'audio stack' is composed of multiple parts, any of which may be causing whatever problem you have. – Bob – 2012-08-10T06:21:42.217

10@Bob You would be surprised, but, this does fix quite a few audio related problems. – William Hilsum – 2012-08-10T06:41:34.550

2@Bob: About 1 in 10 times, all my audio fails when I dock or undock. I've contacted the hardware manufacturer to no avail. The solution below (restarting AudioSrv) works 100% to fix this. This is not an XY problem, it's a common approach to fix things in Windows when they don't work. – PonyEars – 2013-12-25T00:30:34.940

@Bob just now, some process consumed a lot of memory, and the system was out of RAM. As usual, Firefox and several other things crashed, but this time, audio broke, too. Restarting AudioSrv resolved it in no time. – WGH – 2014-03-30T14:07:03.527

I've received several responses to my comment, the latest from @WGH. My point isn't that it won't help, my point is that it's useful to include more information in a question - and it's usually better to fix the root cause, since restarting the audio service (which is just a small part of the 'audio stack', and wont necessarily help with kernel-mode driver errors) is definitely not normal behaviour, and a patchy solution at best. – Bob – 2014-03-30T14:16:24.730

That answer was a good guess, but still a guess. The actual issue could have had symptoms anywhere from lag, BSoDs, random restarts, file deletions/corruption, to even a literal fire, as unlikely as it is (yes, any kernel-mode driver failing can cause any of these, depending on the failure mode). And the fact remains that it's a temporary solution to most problems. (Not that it's a bad answer, @WilliamHilsum, but the question itself is lacking a lot of potentially useful information. Heck, we don't even know which version of Windows!. I'd also say it's not a fix if the issue recurs.) – Bob – 2014-03-30T14:19:53.947

@Bob - I disagree and think it is the perfect answer to this question! If this was a "how to diagnose BSOD from audioxxx.sys", or my sound stops every 30 seconds, then I understand your concern... but, the question was purely "how to restart the audio stack" which my answer addresses.

I sort of agree with you, but, I do virtualising - sometimes I use too much memory and my graphics flash and the OS acts weird for a few seconds - then, the audio sometimes stops and I perform this... there isn't always related audio issues - sometimes giving the stack a "kick" is just the best cause of action. – William Hilsum – 2014-03-30T18:56:58.773

– hippietrail – 2014-05-27T11:42:34.707

Answers

Yes.

Go to an elevated command prompt and type net stop AudioSrv followed by net start AudioSrv

or right click on Computer, click on Manage and expand Services. Right click on Windows Audio and click restart.

William Hilsum

Posted 2012-08-10T06:09:29.163

Reputation: 111 572

1My sound must have been super borked because this didn't work for me, but restarting did. sigh :( I'm on Windows 10 (v1703). – Chiramisu – 2017-06-07T18:25:23.443

2Thanks man. Works for me to resolve my presently-undiagnosed audio issue. – Preston – 2013-09-01T16:56:06.457

Downvoting only because this is not sufficient on my HP netbook with Windows 7 Starter. – hippietrail – 2014-05-27T11:45:56.640

FWIW, I created a batch file that does the whole kit-and-kaboodle (including UAC prompting)

https://gist.github.com/tigerhawkvok/b27b0cbaca2deda1ae33

Tested on Windows 10.

Philip Kahn

Posted 2012-08-10T06:09:29.163

Reputation: 31

2Please quote the essential parts of the answer from the reference link(s), as the answer can become invalid if the linked page(s) change. – DavidPostill – 2016-03-05T19:55:55.310

Let me put my small tweak here... Restarting audio services helps sometimes but in my case the problem was that sometimes one channel ONLY (most of the time it's the left one) suddenly stops. Restarting audio services did not fix it. What i do with success is simply go into speaker settings - advanced and change the "default format" to something else (e.g.24bit 48khz studio quality) , apply the new setting and then revert to my preferred one and apply the new setting again. That fixes it every time.

Tasos

Posted 2012-08-10T06:09:29.163

Reputation: 1