Microsoft shares how to fix sound errors on Windows 10 after updating KB5015878

The company has officially acknowledged the issue, shared workarounds for affected customers, and implemented a Known Incident Recovery (KIR) System to prevent the bug from spreading further.

The software giant said the newly discovered bug on Windows 10 affects computers in different ways. Some users experience complete audio muting, while others only have sound on specific ports, devices, or applications.

Microsoft's investigation found that the affected audio driver had the "audio enhancements" setting disabled before the KB5015878 update was installed, or that the device's audio driver had issues with the "audio enhancements" feature. bar".

To prevent the problem from spreading, Microsoft has adopted a KIR system with the ability to undo problematic changes without the user taking any action. Interestingly, this time KIR only guarantees that the error will not affect other computers. Those who have encountered audio errors on Windows 10 after installing KB5015878 should apply one of the three workarounds described below:

If you haven't installed the update yet, you can do the following to prevent problems:

1. Updating the audio device driver (also known as the sound driver or sound card driver) can prevent this problem. You can install driver updates for audio devices from Windows Update or find and download them from the Windows device manufacturer's site and then install them manually.
2. If you're using any "sound enhancement" applications like Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), you should back up all your settings before installing the update.

If only certain apps are affected, you can try the following to minimize the problem:

1. Verify that the audio device set in the app is the one you want. After installing KB5015878 can set the audio device on some applications to default.
2. If the device in the app is as expected, the apps may be caching the Windows Media Device ID (MMDevice). Storing the MMDevice ID is not recommended and may require reinstalling the affected application or contacting the application developer support to resolve the issue when the audio endpoints are restarted and have a new MMDevice ID.

If you've installed the update and are having issues with sound across all apps, you can try the following to minimize the problem:

1. The Windows sound troubleshooter (troubleshooter) can solve the problem for you.
2. If your device's sound is still not working as expected you can follow the steps in the guide below to disable "sound enhancement".
3. .
4. The instructions above use microphones as an example, but you can apply the steps to any affected audio devices.

The audio issue in update KB5015878 affects only consumer versions of Windows 10 20H2, 21H1, and 21H2. It does not affect Windows 11 nor does the recent BitLocker bug only affect Windows 11 and not Windows 10.