Rainmeter Forums

Mr_VincentC wrote:Good afternoon,

I am having the same problem as OP was, minus having any sound enhancement programs installed (that I know of, I have a very new PC and was pretty careful downloading software). Also no matter which audio playback device I choose (speaker, headphones, etc) the visualizer would not respond. I have gone through all the steps in this thread to no avail. Is there any other possible thing that I have missed here?

Thanks in advance!

Are you seeing any error messages in !About/Log?

I see no other error message in the About/Log except for this warning, "failed to initialize audio client." I have also recently tried disabling all other audio devices except for the speakers and restarting Rainmeter, but to no avail.

Thanks for the help!

Mr_VincentC wrote:I see no other error message in the About/Log except for this warning, "failed to initialize audio client." I have also recently tried disabling all other audio devices except for the speakers and restarting Rainmeter, but to no avail.

Thanks for the help!

You said you didn't think you had any sound "enhancement", but I will almost guarantee that you do, especially if it is new as you said.

That error means that something in your system is operating in EXCLUSIVE MODE and will not let the audiolevel plugin create a loopback to see the audio stream.

Make sure you have unchecked the "Allow Exclusive Mode..." box in the ADVANCE Properties of your audio device: If this does not correct it, then you will have to find out what software is taking exclusive control of your sound stream and remove it to get any visualizer to work.

Well then I guess I am on the hunt. Thank you so much for your help!!

Hey guys, I'm having the exact same problem. I've looked through the forum and followed the steps. It looks like I have realtek and something called nahimic on my pc and I couldn't find any other programs mentioning audio (unless windows media?) Is nahimic something I can uninstall without screwing things up? The picture I attached is a rainmeter skin showing the available sound devices and also the information for the default device. I have the Speakers set as default in that pic. If I set the NVIDA (my monitor) to default then the top part fills itself out and the bars dance. Neither the speakers or the HTRise speakers work with the visualizer nor the skin displaying the output device information. Thanks!

One thing of note, if you change your audio device you are using after Rainmeter is running you need to refresh the visualizer skin to have it work.

Ya I've tried refreshing. If I set it to the monitor and refresh the skin displays all the relevant information. If I set either of my other audio devices to default and refresh it goes blank. I think the earlier part about some program interfering was on the right track; I get the error about initializing, I'm just not sure which program might be doing that and I don't wanna uninstall something that's vital for sound or something haha.

Update: I just went ahead and uninstalled Nahimic after copying it to a flash drive just in case and it solved the issue. I haven't noticed any problems yet so give it a shot if there's anyone else in the same boat as me.

Fatpanda970 wrote:Update: I just went ahead and uninstalled Nahimic after copying it to a flash drive just in case and it solved the issue. I haven't noticed any problems yet so give it a shot if there's anyone else in the same boat as me.

Nahimic is more than likely what took exclusive control... I haven't heard of any issues by anyone who removed it from their system.
It is designed to "improve" game sounds but your system should work fine without that "enhancement".

eclectic-tech wrote: ↑July 28th, 2017, 5:20 am All I know is that several other people have solved the issue by not using those "sound enhancement" programs (not sure if they disabled or uninstalled them), and I believe they installed the original Realtek High Definition drives for their hardware.

I do not have those programs, but I do have Realtek High Definition audio on my system and all visualizers works.

So I do not have any first-person experience on the steps you may need to take, other than what I have been told corrected the issue for them.

I registered just so I could say THANK YOU, as this is exactly what fixed my problem.
I narrowed down the problem to getting the visualizer to react when I switched to Digital Output (where I heard no sound), but when I was on the default Speakers (Realtek HD) the visualizer did nothing.
I spent the better part of 4 hours trying to fix this. and after hours of searching, it was simply a matter of uninstalling those two applications: Sonic Radar 3, and Sonic Studio 3.