Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Audio Playback Stopped Working

Lately I have been experiencing an issue whereby for some unknown reason my audio playback will suddenly stop working. So far this has only happened after a period of non-usage (not during playback), and especially after waking my computer from sleep.

For awhile I thought the only way to resolve this issue was to restart my PC, but since I very rarely do this and usually have many windows open (serious multi-tasker here) I wanted to find a way to fix this without having to close down everything I'm doing to restart my machine.

After a bit of research and trial and error, I determined (through no help of Microsoft; this time anyway) that by restarting the following services I could resolve the issue.
  • Windows Audio
  • Windows Audio Endpoint Builder

I then wrote the following batch script to make this easier for myself in the future. This script will open a new command window, stop and start the above services, and pause at the end so you can verify the results if you like. Clicking on this link will open the text view of the file in a new window where you can copy paste into your own *.bat file or download the provided script. Or you can right-click "Save as..." to download directly. :)

Audio Svc Restart.bat

Cheers,
Matthew