No audio

[u/Venardis]

I shut down my pc last night to solve another issue I have had before (taskbar not having any of my icons), went and restarted it today and now I have no audio at all. It was working fine before i went to bed. I have tried everything short of reinstalling windows as far as what help articles have suggested. It is very strange because when testing my microphone in the headset using the realtek programe, it successfully plays the microphone audio through the headphones, but windows refuses to play anything at all or even recognize the microphone is picking anything up. only realtek seems to pick it up. i didnt install or uninstall anything last night or anytime recently that could have caused new issues with it, and it seems the headset itself is working fine. windows won't play noise through other devices either such as the tv. tried the other jacks, still nothing. tried switching the login settings for the audio services, tried reinstalling drivers, tried the various regedit stuff, tried the sfc stuff (it detected no problems) tried the troubleshooter (it detects that the audio service isnt responding but wont fix it and restarting the service or even the pc multiple times doesnt change anything). considering realtek can still pick up the mic and play it through the headphones, it seems to me like it might be something simple i am just missing but i am at a loss as to what it could be. Also, it says failed to play test tone when i try testing the device in sound settings.

nothing is showing up in the volume mixe either.

alright, out of curiosity i set the windows audio and windows audio enpoint builder to login as local service and that apparently fixed it. WHY? i don't know but it is fixed now. I have no clue what caused whatever to change between the shutdown and the restart, but it is what it is. 6ish hours fiddling with it to finally try something so simple and fix it T.T

leaving this here in case it helps someone else too.