Ok so heres my problem. My sound works fine before a game is launched. If I alt+ tab and i am watching a youtube video or another application that uses sound the game will start without sound and the sound will not work for the rest of the game. It will only work if i close LOL and restart the application and start a new game. My question is, is there a way to fix this? Its quite annoying, even if i alt tab and am not running another program it will sometimes cut the sound off.
Hmmm. I can't say I've ever heard of that happening before.
tl;dr potential fix: go into the sound options and click the checkbox - disable all sound. hit apply. click that checkbox again. hit apply.
This unloads and then reloads the game's soundbank files. you'll notice your game's music has started over from the beginning.
Doing this is also a potential fix for things like stuck looping turret lasers and other various stuck/looping spell audio.
Your specific issue at first glimpse sounds like it could be related to audio drivers not releasing from certain applications. I've never heard of a bug where all the game's soundbanks didn't load or our audio engine didn't initialize. Please let us know if you have this problem again and if that fix worked or not. Good luck!
My GF's computer has a similar problem. Her's- if she lets her screen time out/go black, no fullscreen program will play sound. Are you running sound through a tv/HDMI cable by any chance? If you are, try unplugging the HDMI, and plugging it back in, works for gf's compy. Sound settings through HDMI get reset to default/speakers when it loses signal from the tv to computer, and her not having speakers (just built in tv speakers) it refuses to use them till the video connection is lost then restored.
I have a feeling that your sound driver is switching playback modes. If one application is using sound, and then another wants to, what usually happens is that the new application will be forced to use the same playback mode as the application already using it. Simply put, because of LoL's overly simplified audio engine, if your sound driver is switching modes instead, this can cause LoL's audio output to stop being heard.
Upon initialization, the LoL audio engine "locks on" to the default audio device. This is why you can change the default audio device after launching the game client and its audio stays put, because there's no internal checking going on. And if there's a problem, the only way to get it working again is to re-initialize the game's audio engine by restarting the game client. Although you could try disabling audio in-game and switch it back on; that may do the same thing; I'm not sure.
If I'm right, the only potential fix would be somewhere in your driver settings.
