No Audio Through Default Device

Hello all! First time poster… still wrapping my head around this powerful yet intimidating program.

My computer is set up to output sound through two devices – my computer speakers, and a television via HDMI. I switch the output manually by selecting a new default device in the sound control panel. As I understand it, Retroarch is configured to automatically output sound to whatever device is selected as the default. This works just fine for my computer speakers. However, when I switch the TV/HDMI output to default, I don’t get any audio from Retroarch. I can confirm the device is working, since all other programs output sound just fine. I’ve tried all the different audio drivers (xaudio, dsound, sdl2), but none seem to function over HDMI.

In a strange wrinkle, I tried launching games through retroarch_debug.exe. The audio outputs through HDMI just fine. I’m baffled as to why this would be. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just run everything through the debug program (is there any downside to this?). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

That’s indeed weird. There’s no problem with running through the debug executable. All it does is silences the output and doesn’t spawn the console window.

Well, the debug exe isn’t reliable either – after launching a few games, I no longer get sound over HDMI through the debug RetroArch either. Does anyone have any ideas why RetroArch is refusing to output sound over HDMI? I’ve tried all the different audio plugins. My receiver definitely supports 48000k audio. What could possibly be causing this? It’s driving me crazy.

Does it make any difference if you try to use a fresh config? That is, move your retroarch.cfg somewhere where RetroArch can’t find it and then copy and rename retroarch-default.cfg to retroarch.cfg and then start RA again.

Unfortunately, no. I just tried that – still no audio through the HDMI output. Analog works just fine. Any other ideas?

I finally got this working again. Since the problem was through HDMI, I updated my nVidia drivers to the latest version using the “clean install” option. Something must have gotten screwed up with nVidia’s HD audio drivers. I’ll post again if it breaks again, but I hope this helps anyone with a similar problem!

Oh nice. Congrats!

And thanks for posting your solution.