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How to make your sound card show up in multimedia control applet.

Posted By : Brian of Data Doctors on February 15, 2001

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How can I make the sound card show up in the Multimedia Control Panel in order to select it as the preferred playback device again?

The sound card shows up in Device Manager and there are no conflicts. I have tried removing/redetecting it in Device Manager and tried uninstalling/reinstalling the sound drivers. The sound card works in other systems, but no sound card works in mine so I know it is not hardware related.

This question was answered on February 15, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


There are many things that can cause the multimedia applet to not let you select a preffered playback device, but these are the two most common reasons;

1) Sound.drv=mmsound.drv is missing from the [boot] section of the system.ini file located in the windows folder or the troubleshooting utility added "tsh" in front of the [boot] header causing windows to skip the entire section during startup Removing the "tsh" will fix this or create the sound.drv=mmsound.drv entry anywhere in the [boot] section.

2) The sound driver version is wrong Windows 3.1 drivers will prevent preffered playback selection in any windows 9x environment The same thing happens with windows 98SE and ME drivers in windows 98 First Edition and any windows 95 version Windows 95 and 98 First Edition drivers, on the otherhand will generally work OK in windows 98SE and ME Go to your sound manufacturers website and download the drivers that are correct for your version OS.

It is also not a bad idea to install the latest version of DirectX Currently it is version 8 You can download from the Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/directx/homeuser/downloads/default.asp.

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Posted by Brian of Data Doctors on February 15, 2001

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