Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 has an audio bug (that we reported on yesterday), a glitch which can take out the PC's sound completely, and it's now clear that this affects multiple Windows versions.
That means not just those on Windows 11 24H2 (an update that's still rolling out), but people running 23H2 and 22H2, and also Windows 10.
[...] Apparently, this bug mainly affects those who use an audio DAC (a digital-to-analog converter, like the one in the pic below) hooked up via USB.
However, it can happen to any unlucky Windows 11 (or 10) user who grabs the latest patch.
As Windows Latest spotted, Microsoft has confirmed the issue, stating that: "After installing this security update, you might experience issues with USB audio devices. You are more likely to experience this issue if you are using a USB 1.0 audio driver-based DAC in your audio setup."
Sadly, there isn't a fix, and the only way to avoid your audio being torpedoed is to remove the external DAC (assuming you're using one, and this is what's causing the problem).
[...] This is an odd one for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it's unusual to see a bug disrupting every available version of Windows 11, and Windows 10 as well – that represents an alarming across-the-board clattering of dominoes.
Secondly, the January update doesn't bring anything in the way of new features (to any of these OS versions). It's a very straightforward patch applying some security fixes, and that's all.
So, it really shouldn't be causing any issues, but clearly, it is.
[...] Whatever the case, this is yet another hassle for Windows 11 users, particularly those on 24H2, some of who've been experiencing a very hard time of it lately, with a seemingly relentless stream of bugs crawling in the general direction of those users.
That includes some nasty affairs, like a glitch which triggered crashes with certain SSDs, for example, and more recently, there was another audio bug causing havoc. So Microsoft has not been faring well on the sound front lately.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Gaaark on Monday February 03, @10:14PM (15 children)
Of course you can. I use linux!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Funny) by Tork on Monday February 03, @11:17PM (6 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Touché) by ShovelOperator1 on Tuesday February 04, @10:06AM (5 children)
The game "Make sound working on Linux" is still a thing.
Mostly with laptops. The typical Intel's audio chipset is frequently "enhanced" by additional armature, switches and connectors. To make them operable, Linux driver has to be loaded with specific options telling it which "decorations" to use. If they are not present, or are set for a different revision of a sound implementation, you may randomly get:
- No sound when the notebook is docked,
- No sound at all until forcing any BIOS error causing the computer to beep,
- No sound until reboot,
- Noise, pops and clicks seconds after playing audio.
- Constant overload on headphones, like in impedance incompatibility.
I finally found why this happens. These geniuses at Dell put the sound output into dock by routing analog signals, and to make it worse for some reason there are 5 of them. There is no feature for switching it in Intel's audio chipset, so they invented their own switch. You think, it's just writing a bit somewhere, isn't it? NO! The ritual to switch audio using this monster is:
1. Activate/wake up the sound card. Click!
2. Set sampling rate for playback to some outer-space value like 100kHz.
3. Push a specific high frequency for a specific time starting at the specific moment after initialization. While frequency is inaudible, the pop when it starts and ends is.
4. Re-clock the card to the default playback frequency.
5. Pray that it was correctly done, no interrupt fired during the ritual, and if it fired it did not mess with timings.
This is worse than (thanks Softwin) offering a hardware keyboard bombarding the controller with a "headphones plugged" and "Headphones unplugged" scancodes.
The switch is not idiot-proof. If anything goes bad in the ritual, even by nanosecond, the switch lands in the unusable state, like Mic+Speakers shorted, and the only thing that can pull it to operation is to power cycle the system.
At the peak moment, half of these Dells users had a post-it note saying "Do not turn on with headphones connected".
(Score: 3, Touché) by stormreaver on Tuesday February 04, @11:52AM
That doesn't sound so much like an operating system issue as it does a massive hardware design flaw.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Whoever on Tuesday February 04, @04:04PM (2 children)
Still? What laptop has a dock, other than a USB-C port?
My Dell laptop runs Linux Mint and I have never had issues with sound.
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Wednesday February 05, @04:03AM
The only major audio issues I ever recall having were related to software that needed to work with JACK way back when (and I didn't know how to set that up in a way that made sense to my workflow).
Going back even further, there was software that needed OSS but distros stopped shipping it due to oss4 going proprietary.
Then there was the problem of multiple applications only supporting the direct use of OSS and would fail if ran at the same time (which was later partially solved by ALSA's dmix plugin but was still a pain).
Or when we had some applications designed to use aRts, some using EsounD, and you'd invariable run into problems if trying to use an application expecting the one you weren't using (although perhaps each daemon could have been configured to use ALSA's dmix to work simultaneously... that was beyond the scope of my knowledge at the time).
Hmm... I guess GNU/Linux did historically have a lot of audio issues. However, all of these were solved probably 15 to 20 years ago.
Oh wait, I can think of a recent audio issue. If I'm playing a video and I use the Plasma sound controls (interfacing with pipewire) to switch audio output to a different soundcard, occasionally the video won't seamlessly transition to the other soundcard and I'll have to restart the video playback application. It's something I do so infrequently, and is so simple to work around that I almost forgot about that one!
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday February 05, @07:36PM
Dell offered their expandable i7-based "Mobile Workstation" notebooks for a ridiculously long time after starting this series in mid-2010s, and they were always dock compatible, they were bought for CADs, however I have seen a FEA solver crunching matrices on it for a week. And 5-6 years ago buying it was the best way to get Intel-based notebook with ME stuck in the "interface initialization" step. Of course if a 3.5 kilogram laptop was not a problem.
Precision M4xxx/6xxx models manufactured 2018-2020 contained really drastic engineering to put newer, easier to obtain logic inside and maintain the original features. No idea who was buying it outside of some design studios, but they had to pay a lot as it was made for so long maintaining the compatibility. And they all have the legendary "ME DISABLED" marks :-).
(Score: 3, Informative) by boltronics on Wednesday February 05, @12:15AM
I have an old Logitech 5.1 surround sound system, with 5 analog cables running to the sound card. Since I have a bunch of computers in my room (14 if including laptops), I just have everything connected to a Creative Labs USB sound card (also pretty old at this point, but works great), so I can just plug the USB cable into whatever I want to get audio.
I rarely boot into Windows though, so for all I know, my audio might not be working there. Thankfully I run GNU/Linux, where every piece of hardware I've ever tried to use in the past 5+ years that I can immediately recall Just Works(TM).
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04, @12:47AM (1 child)
You're breaking up. Are you using Pulse Audio by any chance?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday February 05, @03:33AM
I try not to use Lennart Poettering software, spank him very much.
Got Pulseaudio?
Computer says no... *cough*
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday February 04, @02:03PM (1 child)
PulseAudio has entered the chat!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday February 05, @03:30AM
systemd has deleted the chat!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday February 04, @03:48PM
Some years ago another Linux techie disliked start up sounds but I told them it shows me that my sound is still working!
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday February 04, @05:51PM (2 children)
Of all the things you could harp on. Audio in Linux has it's own share of woes. Getting audio working in Linux is possibly one of the most frustrating things I've dealt with when using Linux.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Wednesday February 05, @03:24AM (1 child)
I haven't had any issues in a couple decades. Not sure why you do?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday February 05, @11:29PM
My most recent trouble was getting sound from a Record Player, but 'eh. If there's one thing I've had issues with in Linux it's sound. Still, things are so much better than they used to be.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 04, @02:10AM (1 child)
For-profit software producers stubbornly follow this ownership sophistry that over and over leads them to make bad choices and create inferior software that is deliberately crippled. Also obfuscated so that outsiders cannot fix or improve it.
There's a possibility this audio bug arises from problems with DRM. That this bug affects both Windows 11 and 10 is suggestive of that. A misfeature of DRM would affect both these commercial OSes. Also suggestive is that the bug affects audio, a major target of DRM. If it is a DRM problem, MS might engage in another tactic too often seen from big corporations: misleading, lying, and denial. They might not admit it has anything to do with DRM, instead issuing some bland statement that glibly says it was just a mistake in some audio mixer function or USB driver or whatever. The 2007 launch of Windows Vista went disastrously because MS took the Digital Restrictions Management too far.
Bugs in the DRM is something you just don't see in libre software. Obviously, no DRM means no DRM related bugs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday February 04, @02:18AM
Huh. That sounds (heh) all too plausible.
In other news, my only Win11 that's still allowed to update just told me "Your version is no longer being updated" (22H2). Well, okay. Saves me the bother of disabling updates while everything still works.
And I do most media on the linux box anyway.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by squeedles on Tuesday February 04, @02:33AM
Use a Focusrite Scarlett box as a playback interface for better quality than the builtin hardware, and occasionally for ripping vinyl. Can confirm that Win 11 audio is horrible.
Worked flawlessly under Win 10, but audio sporadically cuts out since moving to a new Win 11 laptop. Switching to another audio output and back usually corrects it. Drivers are all up to date.
The stock OS install cut out frequently and had playback glitches. Eventually discovered that setting PCI link state power management from max to moderate helped quite a bit. Saw a lot of people setting cpu affinity for audio things and all acpi things to two separate sets of cpus, but never went down that road. I just keep the old Win 10 laptop for when I need to rip vinyl, because win 11 cant be trusted.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday February 04, @02:51AM
No muss, no fuss. Just sayin'
(Score: 3, Funny) by skaplon on Tuesday February 04, @12:53PM (1 child)
Microsoft's quality department hasn't being sound for a while now
(Score: 2, Touché) by HyperQuantum on Wednesday February 05, @11:54PM
They have a quality department?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Spamalope on Tuesday February 04, @06:18PM
This one got my W11 box last week. The Realtek audio driver was... gone entirely.
HDMI audio out continued to work though.
Is this a DRM 'bug' affecting non-MPAA/RIAA controlled devices?