If you’ve been using RetroArch to emulate some of your retro games for your PC for quite some time now and didn’t encounter any problem. But, suddenly one day, sounds on every game you’ve played becomes muted. Well, in our case it takes scratching our head to get a solution to fix the issue. The problem mainly, Windows 10 are having hard time recognizing the driver of your RetroArch program if its recently updated, moved or opened into a new formatted OS.
When you recently do those changes on your computer, most likely you’ll get a mute sound problem on RetroArch.
To fix this issue, there are several ways to troubleshoot this problem. Below are some of it.
- Check if the RetroArch is muted
- Sound Audio driver was not properly set
- RetroArch is muted on Volume mixer of Windows 10
- New copy of RetroArch and place in a new directory
Check if the RetroArch is muted
First of all, you might unknowingly muted the RetroArch while pressing random keys on your computer. You need to check your RetroArch program if its muted or the volume was set to 0.
To check if RetroArch is muted, go to Settings > Audio. Then make sure the Mute is turned OFF.
In game, for toggling mute, press F9. Then for increasing the volume up, press +. (If you change this key configuration, you can check the key binding by going to Settings > Inputs > Hotkeys).
If this doesn’t solve your sound problem, you can move on the next solution.
Sound Audio driver was not properly set
The next troubleshoot solution might be your Drivers was not set properly. The default audio driver and settings for RetroArch was Wasapi.
To set it back to its default sound driver, go to Settings > Audio > Output.
For Audio driver, you need to use Wasapi.
Then turn off the following:
- WASAPI Exclusive Mode
- WASAPI Float Format
Make sure to restart after you change these settings, then run RetroArch again and play some games to try out.
RetroArch is muted on Volume mixer of Windows 10
If the configuration of your RetroArch has no problem, the volume might be turned off on Window’s volume mixer. In Windows 10, users are allowed to manually set the volume of each programs in Windows 10 by adjusting it on the volume mixer.
To check if volume mixer is the culprit, right click the volume icon on the bottom right corner of your Windows 10 taskbar. Then click Open volume mixer.
From here, all programs that uses sounds will be listed. Check if RetroArch was set to low volume or it was muted.
If RetroArch is not listed on Volume Mixer, there might be an issue where Windows 10 cannot recognized any of the sound driver in the program. You need to do the next step to fix this.
New copy of RetroArch and place in a new directory
If RetroArch is not listed on the volume mixer, you need to grab a new copy of RetroArch from their website. You just need the zipped package, the installer is optional.
You can get the zipped package on their download page website. Scroll down for Windows 10 / 8 / 7, then you’ll find Download (64bit) or Download (32bit). Just pick what OS system you have.
After downloading the zipped file, extract it into a new directory. For example, at C:/your_directory/retroarch_x.
Open up RetroArch then try checking game if there are sounds, it should also appear on the volume mixer after doing this.
To load your old configurations, you just need to copy the retroarch.cfg from your old directory to your new one.
That’s it! If you still encounter the problem after doing all of the troubleshoot above or if you have a better solution. Please leave a comment down below so we can look into it.
Hi there, I did all of these steps and yet none of theme seemed to work. I was customizing my menu sounds and they were working normally like they were last night but for some reason when I booted up Adventure for the Atari 2600, the sounds stopped altogether. I tried doing everything as stated but not one single thing worked. Is there any reason why booting up a game may have shut down all sounds?