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No Sound from Rift Headphones after Playing a few Minutes

Oimann
Explorer

Hi,

i have the Problem, that the Sound of my Rift Headphones doenst work after some time. When I start Oculus Home the Sound out of the Headphones is fine. Somtimes after 5 Minutes, sometimes after 1 hour, the Headphones stop working. If i restart Oculus Home, the Sound is back again. Using my own Headphones with my Soundcard, there is no Problem.

Is this a known issue? Any work around to fix it?  

88 REPLIES 88

Cain_Bloodbane
Adventurer
Okay, so I decided to go with the script option, to find a way to disable and enable to Rift Audio from a command line.

Looking into this, I found that Windows has a command line tool called DevCon.exe. Problem here is that when you look it up you find some Microsoft pages that tells you to install Visual Studio, Windows SDK and WDK. That is about 5-7gigabyte you need to download and install... wait that is not counting Visual Studio. Anyway, even though I already had Visual Studio Installed, when I got to the Windows SDK I found that the download was pretty slow, so I began looking for alternative solutions.

First I found a much easier way to get DevCon, but it was the Windows Vista version and it was 32bit, so it would fail whenever I tried doing anything more than look up my devices and their different ids.

Then I found this link:
http://delphintipz.blogspot.com/2012/07/disable-failed-no-devices-disabled.html

It has a link to the Windows 7 64 bit version of DevCon.exe and it works with Windows 10 as well. It also has a command to restart devices, which I think might be perfect for this case.

Now, you are supposed to find the exact ID of your device and use a command to make that one device restart, but I have failed to find a way to use that ID, since it contains symbols like & which confuses the execution.

So I am going with:
devcon restart *MMDEVAPI\AudioEndpoints*

It restarts all the audio devices. Pretty sure that would be enough, otherwise I can always refine it later. Now that I have a command that should work, I guess the next problem is finding a way to execute it from within VR in an easy and fast way. Voice commands is probably the most useful I think?

Cain_Bloodbane
Adventurer


Got my Rift today... Having same issue. 
It is a driver related issue.
If you type the commands:
net stop audiosrv
net start audiosrv

Sometimes you also have to do:
net stop ovrservice
net start ovrservice

It will reboot your audio drivers on the PC and reboot the oculus software.
Then it works again without a PC reboot....
Hope they fix this soon 🙂 

Will let you know if I find a solution so that the issue does not occour in the first place


Strange, I already posted about this, but my post seems to be gone. Well, seems I should have looked through this thread better, because this seems to be what I was looking for. I will give this a try.

Yup... this seems to work. "net stop audiosrv" does stop the sound and "net start audiosrv" brings it back.

Now its time to test it with Voice Attack 🙂

Cain_Bloodbane
Adventurer
Okay, pretty sure this works. So I am using Voice Attack to ensure that I am able to use custom voice commands, and I added a command to it so that when I say "enable sound" it will run the batch file I made with these lines:
@echo off
net stop audiosrv
net start audiosrv

Make sure these lines are added to a text file you make with notepad, that the file is saved in ansi format (should be default and you wont be able to change this in Notepad unless its not ansi already). The file extension of this file then needs to be changed to bat instead of txt. So that the name could be "enablesounds.bat" for example.

So it will restart the audio. It still seems to make a command prompt pop up, but that should not be a problem when you are in VR anyway, since it will be on the monitor. A problem with doing this though, is that it requires administrator privileges to run these commands, and if you make a shortcut to run this, it will open with a prompt asking if you are sure whether you want to run this. That would not really work for this purpose, so I found this:
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/create-administrator-mode-shortcuts-without-uac-prompt...

It explains how to run shortcuts as admin without any prompts by setting up a Windows task for it. Then in Voice Attack I add the new command, with the command words being "enable sound" and I set it to run:
C:\Windows\System32\schtasks.exe
with the parameters:
/run /tn "Disable Sound"

Disable Sound is the name of the task I made. So now I can restart my audio without having to go to any menus, or taking off the headset :smiley:

Cain_Bloodbane
Adventurer
Hmmm... this solution also seems to have problems, I have been testing it in different ways. Voice attack does not always seem to run the task, and sometimes when I try to run the task it wont run either... but it seems if I run Voice Attack in admin mode, I can just make it run the batch file directly and it wont show a prompt. It might disable the commands or the Rift Microphone in Voice Attack when the audio is restarted though, and this I think can be fixed by adding some waits, then change to some other audio input / microphone, wait again, and then switch back to the Rift microphone, and I think it will actively listen for commands again.

Cain_Bloodbane
Adventurer
I found several different ways of doing this. The most direct way if you use Voice Attack is to find the Net executable in the Windows/System32 folder and give it the parameters stop audiosrv. Then I add a 3 second pause just to be safe, then net start audiosrv (again choosing net directly in the system32 folder).

Disabling and reenabling sound is likely to stop Voice Attack from listening to commands, so I also add another 3 second wait, then use the Windows command to chance default audio device, so that I set the microphone to something other than the Rift one, add another 3 second wait and then set it back to the Rift microphone, and it should be listening to your commands again. The wait commands might not be needed. Voice Attack is free, but in the free version you only have one profile and only up to 20 commands at any one time. The full version is just 10 dollars I think, so I will probably buy it at some point.

Oh, and remember Voice Attack has to be running as administrator for this to be possible.

Cain_Bloodbane
Adventurer
Well... of course when you want it to happen, it wont. Annoying. Guess I cannot test it for now.

Skylandsbest
Honored Guest
I have been having the same bug for a while now... I have found, when i mess with the settings in windows that if you go to the "advanced" option in the sound control pannel, if you uncheck the box for let applications take priority over this device that it lasts a little longer, but still cuts out... I also have a bug where it will crash for no reason whatsoever.

TomCgcmfc
MVP
MVP
Make sure you go to the rift headset advanced properties and select cd quality (44100 I think).
i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 32Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro, Q3, w/Link and Air Link, Vive Pro1 with Etsy lens mod and Index Controllers

3ee
Honored Guest
Ooooh noooo, i was looking for my problem that sound stops working after a little while, few minutes and this is going on for more then 2 years now?
I really dont have time for this, this is really bad.

I had it working perfectly once after reinstalling all my nvidia drivers.
But then after a reboot all was the same again.
Reinstalled windows twice also....
Did al the other stuff aswel like cd quality, no enhancements, no full control priority, ...
For me this can only be something with usb but i am not willing to buy a new motherboard and not very jumpy to buy the supported usb card because i dont want to pay and find out it doesnt help.

Isnt there any log that can be printed to see what exactly is going on?