Sound keeps getting muted in Windows 11 between use (2024)

I'm under the delusion that I'm quite tech-savvy, but I recently got bested by a 4-year-old mashing on a keyboard.

Long story short, everything was working perfectly, but one day my kiddo was just going crazy on the keyboard... and since then games, Youtube, whatever else tends to start without sound. If I press the volume mute on the keyboard and then again to un-mute it, sounds works normal... Until I finish doing the current thing, sound goes off, and then I with high likelihood (because it doesn't seem to happen every single time, just most of the time) have to do the mute/un-mute thing again. To note, the volume icon in Windows does not show that sound is muted when this happens.

My setup is 6800XT to Denon X1700H, Atmos from the Microsoft store installed. I know nuking Windows and starting fresh will solve it, but it would really make my day if anyone could save me the hassle of doing that.

Mistral said:

Windows does not show that sound is muted when this happens.

Click to expand...

Did you bring up the volume mixer to see if he accidentally muted a specific program?

I would try uninstalling the AMD sound device (not the graphics part), restart and see what happens then. In a more extreme case, uninstall and tick delete driver via 'Device Manager'.
Windows should be storing volume and mute data in the registry, and normally by uninstalling and fully removing the driver, this data should be deleted.

If you uninstall but don't delete the driver, there is a high chance the volume data will be reused after install.

Ferather said:

I would try uninstalling the AMD sound device (not the graphics part), restart and see what happens then. In a more extreme case, uninstall and tick delete driver via 'Device Manager'.
Windows should be storing volume and mute data in the registry, and normally by uninstalling and fully removing the driver, this data should be deleted.

If you uninstall but don't delete the driver, there is a high chance the volume data will be reused after install.

Click to expand...

Thank you. I thought I had already tried uninstalling from within device manager, but gave it another shot. Here are my observations:
- it fixed the mute problem, but also resulted in only stereo sound being available
- the Dolby app (from the MS store) was still installed but there was no way to enable Atmos
- uninstalling the Atmos app and then installing it again brought Atmos back... but it also brought the mute annoyance
- Atmos in nowhere to be found in device manager

So, what's next? Repeating the uninstall and scouring the registry for any leftover Atmos/Dolby entries before reinstalling? Seems that way, but no time to mess with that today...

Mistral said:

Thank you. I thought I had already tried uninstalling from within device manager, but gave it another shot. Here are my observations:
- it fixed the mute problem, but also resulted in only stereo sound being available
- the Dolby app (from the MS store) was still installed but there was no way to enable Atmos
- uninstalling the Atmos app and then installing it again brought Atmos back... but it also brought the mute annoyance
- Atmos in nowhere to be found in device manager

So, what's next? Repeating the uninstall and scouring the registry for any leftover Atmos/Dolby entries before reinstalling? Seems that way, but no time to mess with that today...

Click to expand...

You might be onto something
Have you enabled the reistry tweak of Device Manager Shown Non Present Devices?

DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES

This tweak has been around since I believe before Windows XP,
possibly before NT5.0 (Windows 2000)

I used it to clean up USB issues with devices not being detected

It might help