No audio

[HaplessOne]

The very first time I booted the game up, the audio was perfectly fine. The second time the audio was fine as well. Stepped away for about a half hour with the game running at the character selection screen just to come back and find that I had no audio. At first, I thought it was my headphones or PC, but I've tested things like YouTube and other games, and my audio seems to work fine. I've already tried everything I could find in FAQ about audio issues. I legitimately have no idea what could have changed from when I left my pc to when I came back, but no matter what I do I can't get audio. The game is just perma muted... Here's a list of what I've tried so far:

• I've reinstalled the game (multiple times)
• tried to repair game files through the launcher
• tried to run it in dx9
• tried to mess with the audio settings and confirm that it was sensing my headphones as an output device
• tried to download old Microsoft redistributables
• tried to install old .net frameworks
• Tried to mess with the exclusive audio settings of my headphones
• restarted my pc
• factory reset my pc (which came with its own issues trying to re-install and launch the game, but I was able to fix the launch errors)
• tried to run the 32 bit version of the client
• tried to reset the audio settings back to default after messing with them multiple times
• tried to reset all game settings back to default
• tried to close out programs that might be taking audio priority
• turned off steam and nvidia overlays, since tabbing out of the game while its loading can cause audio issues, and I know some old games can act as if they tabbed out when the overlay stuff pops up when launching them

The only thing I can think of at this point is that the game doesn't like the fact that I'm using Bluetooth headphones or something, which would be strange because the game recognizes them in the audio settings. It's just driving me crazy that it worked fine at first and suddenly it just decided it doesn't want to play audio anymore, even upon factory resetting my entire PC. I've never seen anything like this in all my years of gaming. I'm also on windows 11 if that matters.

 

[Mindos]

You deleted the userpreferences.ini?
With the game running, if you look at the windows desktop and click on the speaker sound icon near the taskbar, does it show the volume slider for the game muted?

 

[HaplessOne]

You deleted the userpreferences.ini?
With the game running, if you look at the windows desktop and click on the speaker sound icon near the taskbar, does it show the volume slider for the game muted?

So, probably an hour after posting this I figured it out. For some reason, even though the settings were set to my headphones as the output in game, it's like it was still trying to use other audio sources and failing. I disabled all other audio sources except my headphones, and that made it work. What's really odd, is even after re-enabling those audio sources it still was finally fully recognizing my headphones again.

 

[FaceDancer]

I lock ou other audio sources that are not in use because DDO can be funny sometimes. I have a USB DAC so I usually have to disable Realtek onboard audio, & Nvidia HDMI audio as examples. Obviously this is something that is unique to each persons system but it makes DDO less quirky. It will still occasionally fail to load audio and generally a game restart is all that is required to initialize it.