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

Question

Sometimes, when I start my machine, the volume control is set to 100, but it plays relatively quiet. I can fix it by rebooting my machine. Is there a way to restart audio devices, without rebooting the computer?

score 179 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 19 '18 at 20:42

179

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.

edited Nov 19 '18 at 20:42

Stevoisiak

16,075

answered Jan 03 '13 at 19:10

user184325

1,814

score 47 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 20 '12 at 11:36

47

Open up a command prompt as administrator and run:

net stop audiosrv
net start audiosrv

This restarts the Windows service responsible for handling audio.

answered Dec 20 '12 at 11:36

PhonicUK

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score 12 · Answer 3 · edited Jan 01 '14 at 15:21

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.

edited Jan 01 '14 at 15:21

Peter Mortensen

12,326

answered Sep 05 '13 at 04:41

Akram Ali

137

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 12 '14 at 12:44

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.

edited Aug 12 '14 at 12:44

Jens Erat

18,485
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answered Aug 12 '14 at 12:21

tom

11

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 09 '14 at 20:50

Thanks for the answer, it helped me too. Something stuck in my sound card buffer and kept looping. I was not able to disable my card in Device Manager, (it wanted to restart Windows 7). But stopping the service helped, (though only that did not solve my problem alone).

So this is what I did:

net stop audiosrv
net stop AudioEndpointBuilder

Then I was bale to disable the audio device in Device Manager. Then I re-enabled it, and

net start audiosrv

This reset my card and solved my issue.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 24 '14 at 06:16

This problem is intensely annoying. I have found a solution that works for me. It isn't permanent as you have to do it each time the speakers stop, but it is better than restarting all the time.

Go to Device Manager Right click on Sound video and game controllers and click "scan for hardware changes"

That works for me.

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Nov 20 '14 at 19:37

I came looking for a way to restart my Creative X-Fi Titanium driver w/out restarting. Sometimes when I change the Mode, I'll get a buzz out of the right channel that may force me to restart Win7 several times to get rid of.

This fix didn't work for me but as I was unable to Disable the X-Fi in the Device Mgr., which stated it would require a restart when I tried. I'd tried to kill all related software, but maybe there was something I missed, being the massive driver that it is.

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

7 Answers7

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