Opening Audacity changes volume/balance of Sound Blaster X-Fi 5.1 card

Occasionally (but not every time) when I open Audacity it will lower or mute my overall soundcard volume & other times it will automatically adjust the balance of my left/right speaker settings.

I've tried multiple versions of Audacity (older & recent) as well as two different drivers for my soundcard (the most recent one + one from 2016).

Is there any setting in audacity or my soundcard that could be triggering this? Why is it so random?

Any help is appreciated.

Jarvismcjiggles said:

Is there any setting in audacity or my soundcard that could be triggering this? Why is it so random?

Click to expand...

Yes, I've had issues with my Audacity before. It is most likely a driver conflict or just how you have some of the sound settings that overlap/overlay what software plays sound where.

I'm hitting the hay for the evening and I have a full morning. Iko22 or maybe Paul Black may be of help.

Well I don't use Audacity. I found this article that might be of help fix windows 7 automatically reduces system volume for games pc calls. See if that makes any difference.

Hi Jarvismcjiggles,

I have not used Audacity myself but you could perform the following to rule out driver issues.

To find out if all your hardware device drivers are working correctly you can check for any yellow triangles in the Device Manager [Start => Control Panel => Device Manager => Expand ALL nodes].

If there are any yellow triangles you can view the Device Status [it will give you the Error message / Error code] of the problem by right-clicking the item with the Error => Properties => General tab.

You can also check for any problems by clicking Start => Run => in the search box type msinfo32 => Enter => Components. If there are any problem drivers they will be shown on the right-hand side of the Components screen. When it is blank, you are good to go.

Another option is => Find and Identify Unknown Devices through Device Manager.

I hope this helps!

I've noticed that if I move the playback volume slider in Audacity, the computer's global output volume slider is also changed, and vice versa. It's a HP laptop with whatever default sound board and drivers they provided. The only way I know to decouple them is to choose Communications Headphones in the Playback Device box - then presumably Audacity's playback volume instead gets coupled to the headphones, which I guess is my USB wireless headphones volume. It doesn't seem possible to get Audacity to keep its playback volume to itself.



It's a long shot but maybe your problem is related to that.