Is there a way to restart audio without restarting a Windows 7 computer?

Become or hire the top 3% of the developers on Toptal https://topt.al/25cXVn

--

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Breezy Bay

--

Chapters
00:00 Question
00:31 Accepted answer (Score 163)
00:56 Answer 2 (Score 41)
01:15 Answer 3 (Score 12)
02:07 Answer 4 (Score 1)
02:53 Thank you

--

Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/521955/i...

Accepted answer links:
[Task Manager's]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Tas...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#windows7 #audio #volumemixer

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 169

I also had to stop AudioEndpointBuilder and restart it

net stop audiosrv
net stop AudioEndpointBuilder
net start audiosrv
net start AudioEndpointBuilder

If you look at Windows' Task Manager's "services" tab, that might help you identify what services you have tied to audio.

ANSWER 2

Score 43

Open up a command prompt as administrator and run:

net stop audiosrv
net start audiosrv

This restarts the Windows service responsible for handling audio.

ANSWER 3

Score 12

For Windows 7, I used this and hope it will work for all Windows flavors:

Right click on My Computer
Chose Manage
Select Device Manager in the left panel
Expand Sound, video and game controllers
Find your audio driver and right click on it.
Chose Disable
Right click on the audio driver again
Chose Enable

It should start working now.

ANSWER 4

Score 1

Check your device manager and go to audio in and outputs. Now check the box show hidden devices (in view) and delete all the devices other than the ones that you have when you didn't show the hidden devices. Reboot.

There must have been some leftover drivers that interfered.