K7S5A sound troubles

[natopotato]

I recently lost sound in windows on my lan box. sound works in games and in windows media player but i can not get sounds from IE or realplayer. I also do not get error sounds or the startup noise in windows. when i try to play something in realplayer, it says the sound device (i'm using the onboard c-media chip by the way) is in use. i'm running win2k sp3 on it. anybody have any ideas?

i've been trying a few things but none of them has worked thus far.

 

[Peter]

It seems you still have analog loop-through sound (like from CDROM while playing a game or listening to audio CD) but lost computer generated sound.

The simplest reason would be a muted channel in the mixer. But when Realplayer says "sound device in use", it actually means there is no sound system available. Check whether you lost the driver, or accidentally disabled the sound unit in BIOS or something.

 

[natopotato]

checked it. tried reinstalling the driver multiple times. still no dice.

also to clear up confusion, i get sound in games. sound as in the sounds i am supposed to be hearing.

 

[natopotato]

anyone?

anyone know how to get rid of the c-media mixer(it's like volume control)? i have a feeling this might fix it.

 

[Peter]

The C-Media mixer is just the replacement for the default Windows mixer, to show all the features of the advanced codec (after all, mixing input and output channels is what codecs are about, digital/analog conversion aside).

So you apparently have DirectSound working, but "normal" non-Direct sound apps broken. Try a full uninstall and reinstall of the sound driver package, and don't forget refreshing your DirectX package as well.