Lost sound after trying to play CD

Topic

Windows 11, 23H2. I plugged in an LG portable CD player to play a CD. Not sure exactly what I did. It didn’t play, and now there’s no sound at all. I can play the CD by right-clicking the drive icon, selecting Open, highlighting the .cda tracks, and pressing Enter. That opens Media Player, the old one. The CD plays, but no sound. I’ve tried all the usual ideas, including Audio Troubleshooter.

The same thing happened on my newer PC, running 24H2, but a restart brought back the sound. Both PCs have an Nvidea GPU, but the sound comes from the Realtek High Definition Audio on the motherboard.

Replies

physicist wrote:

…I plugged in an LG portable CD player to play a CD. Not sure exactly what I did. It didn’t play, and now there’s no sound at all.

physicist wrote:

…The CD plays, but no sound. I’ve tried all the usual ideas, including Audio Troubleshooter.

I added the bolding above in the quote.

For the sake of clarity, by “no sound at all” do you mean that you aren’t even getting the normal sounds that come with using Windows or trying to watch or listen to something that’s being streamed to you in addition to there being no sound from any CD when you try to play one?

No sound at all, not even normal Windows sounds, or sounds from YouTube videos.

 

1 user thanked author for this post.

Bob99

Found this in a search for sound issues.

“If you plugged a portable CD player into your PC and now have no sound from your speakers for any source, including YouTube playback, the most likely reason is that your computer’s audio settings have been accidentally changed to output sound through the CD player instead of your regular speakers; check your sound settings in your operating system to ensure the correct playback device is selected and that the volume isn’t muted on either the computer or the CD player itself.”

Here’s the link referenced in the above suggested fix with more info.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-sound-or-audio-problems-in-windows-73025246-b61c-40fb-671a-2535c7cd56c8

MacOS iPadOS and sometimes SOS

3 users thanked author for this post.

SueW, physicist, PKCano

Thank you.

That’s what I thought must be the problem, but it didn’t seem to be the problem. Here is what Control Panel/Sound/Playback looks like. (It took two screenshots for all the output devices to fit.) It seems okay.

I don’t know why all those are there; my newer PC only has these:

On the older PC I tried this: enable Realtek Digital Output, restart the PC, disable Realtek Digital Output. Now sound works, but why that combination worked, I do not understand.

 

 

 

physicist wrote:

why that combination worked, I do not understand

Vagaries of software. We often see reports of disable/enable fixing things.

cheers, Paul