For about 4 days now I’ve been without any sound in Firefox. My operating system is windows vista, my IE sound worked just fine, and the only solutions I’ve found on the net involve the Wavemapper trick, reinstalling flash, using the K-Lite Codec Tweak or using CCleaner to fix it.
None of these worked for me, and I decided to try to fix it myself.
Now, given that I still had audio in IE, I knew my flash installation was okay, and that it’s not a Codec issue. I began to think to myself, ‘What did I do in Firefox that I haven’t done to I.E.’
I had turned the sound down before to mute flash game music, allowing me to hear my own. However, I had since turned the sound back up. I took a shot in the dark and renamed firefox.exe to firefoxFix.exe and that got me my sound back. What had happened is that despite my turning the sound back up, vista refused to correct the volume for firefox.exe. I then opened the registry, deleted the key holding firefox’s volume settings, restored firefox.exe to its original name, and voila, I had my audio back.
Now to share the fix with you in simple steps.
- Click your start menu and enter: Regedit.exe in your search bar and run it.
- Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\LowRegistry\Audio\PolicyConfig\PropertyStore
- Press CTRL+F and enter firefox.exe
- In the bottom of the window, you will see the full key name containing the firefox entry. It will be similar to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\LowRegistry\Audio\PolicyConfig\PropertyStore\f8ef7687_0
Right click that key in the left pane of Regedit and delete it. - Enjoy your audio.
For those who need a little visual help, here’s a screenshot: 
Update: Some users may have multiple keys holding Firefox data. Deleting them all seems to be safe.
- Thanks to Ray for the feedback.
In response to Fletchman’s Comment (I figured this was worth responding to up here.):
Fletch, this is a rather esoteric issue, in that it only affects people with firefox on vista that like to turn the sound off to shut up things like flash ads. It’s really the fault of Microsoft, not youtube or Adobe.
As for my solution’s availability, you should have seen what I went through to find it. When I had this problem NOBODY had the solution, I had to figure out what was wrong ang fix it myself. It took me 3 days. I’ve already gone and posted links to it in a bunch of forums that I crossed on my search for an answer, and now if you were to type Sound or audio and Firefox Vista into google, this is either the first or second item (Depending on the order of words.)
Even so, this is a request to everyone this solution helps: if you wouldn’t mind, I’d very much appreciate if you could post a link to this solution in a couple of threads you came across that didn’t have it. Hopefully that will make the lives of future victims of this problem 3 hours less hair-pullingly exciting. Thanks a lot to everyone for the positive feedback!
And there ya have it. Please post any questions or comments you may have for me.
I’m here to help!
