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.Hi,
Since BEFORE Covid, I have not been able to play ANY audio in my Firefox. That means NO YouTube audio (not good) and NO audio in ads (NOT a bad thing). I’ve checked the Windows Volume Mixer and volume is turned up all the way for Firefox. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox with a brand-new profile. NOTHING has fixed this aggravating problem. ANY ideas will be greatly appreciated.
Are you talking about audio only associated with YouTube? What happens when you use another browser? If no audio is coming through when on the YouTube app, check to make sure the volume icon is switched “on”. Default can be the volume is “off”. Hopefully it’s a simple fix. Maybe not Firefox related. Give us more info with apps or sites you use that are affected by the “no audio” dilemma.
MacOS iPadOS and sometimes SOS
Hi Myst, Thanks for responding. I get audio & video (youtube, vimeo, etc) in all my other browsers (Edge, Chrome, and Opera) from ANY web page. I get video in Firefox (v120.0), but no audio from ANY web page (yes, the VOLUME slider is at 100% in all the web pages on which I hear NO audio).
Got it. Didn’t mean to come across with a dumb guess on your problem. I’m not familiar with Firefox but I know many here at AW are. Hope you get an answer soon.
MacOS iPadOS and sometimes SOS
Try something that I’ve seen work for others. Change your sound device from “default” to the actual sound device you want to use.
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Try something that I’ve seen work for others. Change your sound device from “default” to the actual sound device you want to use.
Saw that in one of the links I posted above. Hopefully it works.
MacOS iPadOS and sometimes SOS
Shot in the dark guess:
There are some icons in the address bar, one of which I have see on hover, that can be used to block sound (and maybe autoplay) on a website. I think it is the one with the two lines with circles at opposite ends.
Under the Firefox Privacy & Security Settings, go to Permissions – Autoplay, and click on Settings there. You can keep Audio, or Video, or both from Automatically playing when a video comes up. If audio is blocked, only video will play. Turn on audio in the Firefox Autoplay settings if you see that it’s being blocked.
My apologies if you’ve already tried this. I have my audio and video blocked so it won’t play until I click the Start arrow.
Just the instructions I was going to post when I got the chance. Thanks! 
Since BEFORE Covid, I have not been able to play ANY audio in my Firefox.
That’s because not too long before Covid became a pandemic, Mozilla made blocking audio the default Autoplay setting within Firefox to help folks avoid annoying ads and other then-(and still now) annoying website behaviors. At the time, this setting of disabling audio also was supposed to disable video from what they said in their guidance back then, if I recall correctly.
Under the Firefox Privacy & Security Settings, go to Permissions – Autoplay, and click on Settings there. You can keep Audio, or Video, or both from Automatically playing when a video comes up. If audio is blocked, only video will play. Turn on audio in the Firefox Autoplay settings if you see that it’s being blocked.
To this day, the default setting in the area described by @Charlie is to have audio blocked by itself. Doing what he says in his statement above should get your audio back in order. To find the exact area, you’ll have to scroll about 1/2-2/3 of the way down the Privacy & Security settings page. If it doesn’t work, please let us know so we can go looking elsewhere within Firefox, since you say that only Firefox exhibits this behavior.
OK, then we need to look a little deeper in Firefox. Open a new tab in Firefox, and go to the following address: about:config . Feel free to copy/paste it just as it’s written (including the colon between the two words) into the address bar and hit the Enter key.
You should now see a warning about messing with these settings. Click the blue button labeled “Accept the Risk and Continue”. Now, you should be looking at a blank page with a LONG search box at the top of the page that has a blue outline around it. This box should also have a magnifying glass icon in it along with the words “Search preference name”. In this specific search box type the following, (without the quotes, of course) but do not hit the Enter key, just type the phrase into it and stop typing: “autoplay” (feel free to copy/paste into the specific search box mentioned).
You should now be looking at a page with preferences involving the word autoplay. Look for a preference that says “media.autoplay.default” (which also might be in bold type) and make sure it’s set to the number 5. If it’s anything else, double click it to change the number to the number 5 in the editing box that will appear. Once you’ve made the change, either hit the Enter key or click the check box at the end of the editing box.
Completely purge FF’s cache (this will probably log you out of any sites you’ve signed in to, such as Askwoody) and see if your audio has returned. If it hasn’t (or if the preference is already set to 5 when you see the preference listed) then take a screenshot of that preferences page and include it in your reply so we can see if there’s another preference that’s not set correctly. Please DO NOT change any other preferences on that page unless we tell you to.
I normally run with autoplay disabled, but I enabled it for video only (without audio) and I got a video to play on YouTube without sound when I knew there was supposed to be sound. When I changed the preference to audio and video, the sound came back when I selected a portion of the video that hadn’t been downloaded and played yet. That’s why I asked you to completely purge the cache in the previous paragraph, it will give you a fresh start with a page you’re having problems with.
Look for a preference that says “media.autoplay.default” (which also might be in bold type) and make sure it’s set to the number 5. If it’s anything else, double click it to change the number to the number 5 in the editing box that will appear.
OK, I just got some egg on my face with that one!! Setting that preference to 5 disallows both audio AND video. Setting it to 0 (zero) (where it WAS before I mistakenly told you to change it) allows BOTH audio and video autoplay, so please go back into the about:config page, bring that preference back up as before and set it back to 0 (zero).
Now, as far as the rest of your preferences, two of them need some modification, as they don’t match what I have set in my installation of Firefox that plays both audio and video items from YouTube and other locations on the web (when I choose to let it do so).
BUT, first, a two part question: Do you have any ad blocking (or privacy enhancing) extensions installed in Firefox, and, if you do, did you install any of them around the same time you started having a lack of audio from Firefox??
If the answer is No, then proceed to make the following changes to the following preferences listed in the next paragraph. If the answer is Yes, exactly which extension(s) do you have installed? (And please DON’T make any further modifications besides the one I already mentioned to any preferences listed in your screenshot…you may have to change a setting or two within an extension instead).
If you don’t have any ad blocking (or privacy enhancing) extensions installed, please make the following changes to the following preferences listed in your screenshot. They’re listed in order from top to bottom: Change the second and third preferences (which both show in bold type in your screenshot) back to their defaults by clicking on the counter-clockwise pointing arrow at the end of their listings. This will return the second listed preference’s value to “true” from “false”, and it will turn the third listed preference’s value to “false” from “true”. This will also change their listings from bold type to normal type. Bold is only used for preferences that have been changed from their default values.
You also have a listing in there for a preference that’s been deprecated over the years by Mozilla. It’s the second one up from the bottom of the list and it has a trash can icon at the end of its’ listing (and it’s also listed in bold type); that trash can icon is how I can tell it’s been deprecated. I don’t have that preference listed in my version of Firefox, 120.0 currently, but you may need that preference to remain for some reason in your installation so please don’t remove it.
So, to sum up, if you don’t have any ad blocking or privacy enhancing extensions installed, change the second and third preferences on the list in your screenshot back to their defaults of (in order from top to bottom) “true” and “false”, and change the “media.autoplay.default” preference BACK to where it was in the first place, 0 (zero).
I hope these revised instructions help get your audio back.
I have to sign off for now, but there’s a great person who runs Firefox who may be able to take the baton from here, and his name is @Microfix , one of the MVPs here.
Have you tried to run the portable ESR to check for audio, video sound ?
Download the ESR to a folder. As the app is portable there is no installation/uninstallation. Just extract (run .exe) to the same folder and run.
If you don’t want to switch to ESR (I don’t see why not) delete the folder.
Start Firefox in Safe Mode (i.e. with all extensions and custom settings temporarily disabled) and see if that restores the audio.
If it does, then either an extension or a custom setting you changed is causing your problem.
Try disabling Hardware Acceleration and see if that helps.
Having it enabled (it’s enabled by default) is know to sometimes cause Audio/Video problems; especially viewing videos from YouTube.
I finally fixed my issue by opening up the volume mixer and selecting the speakers, rather than default output for firefox.
I have had this same problem and went through all the above steps. (Even the mistake)
Finally this last post fixed it!! The Firefox was muted in the Volume Mixer (System>Sound>Volume Mixer)
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