No one, either here or in other places where I've found "SndTAudio" mentioned, seems concerned about the sudden appearance of SndTAudio on anyone's system. No one, in any forums I've stumbled onto (granted, I've only been looking for a half hour or so this morning, so I might have missed something), seems very concerned about it.
With most who've mentioned its apperance, they tend to have MULTIPLE occurances of it (up to 16 occurances, in one's guy's case) on the Vista "Playback" tab of the "Sound" dialog accessible from the Control Panel. Nearly all who have these multiple occurances of SndTAudio there claim they have no idea how it got there. And nearly all of them claim to be suffering from the same, curious loss of sound output as the thread-starter here claimed.
Why, I'm wondering, doesn't anyone in any forum threads I've found (including this one) seem to think that that's hugely odd; and/or is/are alarmed by it?
It came to my attention this morning when, suddenly, my RadioSure player (the hands-down BEST freeware Internet radio player on the planet, I've discovered... better, believe it or not, than ScreamerRadio... but now I digress... sorry) stopped being able to make any sounds come out of my speakers. Its little visual audio indicators where moving, telling me that it was streaming, but nothing was coming out of the speakers. I, of course, checked all the obvious things... that my master volume was up, that RadioSure's volume was up, that nothing was muted, that the speakers themsleves were on and that the volume knob thereon was up... etc., etc., etc. I've been in IT 32 years, so I know what to make sure is set right.
Still nothing.
So I looked at RadioSure's "Advanced" options and noticed that the audio device it was using was "SndTAudio Speakers."
"What the hell is that?" I said, literally aloud, to myself. I knew that my default audio output was supposed to be "Conexant High Definition SmartAudio HD2 Speakers." (I'm running 32-bit Vista SP2 on an HP dv6500 series notebook, by the way.)
I opened Control Panel, and then the "Sound" dialog, and, sure enough, on the "Playback" tab, I had something like a dozen occurances of "SndTAudio Speakers," the bottommost of which had been set as the default audio output device.
"What the he...?" I mumbled... eyebrows firmly furrowed.
I used my copy of "Search Everything" (if you don't have this, you need it... it's free... and... well... you won't believe how fast it searches... but I digreess again... sorry) to find "sndtaudio" and I found a folder named "sndtaudio.inf_cd15d185" in the...
C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository
...folder, in which I found a whole list of SndTAudio drivers and .inf files and .cat files... etc. I looked at the folder's creation date and it was about ten days ago, on 7/6/2009. I started thinking about whether I had even listened to RadioSure in the past ten days and realized I hadn't... hence the reason, I surmized, that I hadn't notice the problem until today.
I then opened my REVO UNINSTALLER (yet another freebie that every reader here should have... trust me, it's unbelievable... but here I am digressing again... sorry) and sorted by installation date and saw that the only audio-related software I had installed on that date was a copy of "Sound Taxi." I will, of course, be going over to Sound Taxi's web site after I get done with this post to see if it installs this infernal "SndTAudio" thing... and, if so, WHY!?!?
It is worthy of note, I think, that, yesterday, I discovered some very nasty malware that somehow sneaked onto my system, despite my having a terrific firewall and all the other typical anti-malware stuff running. It really was nasty, too... the kind of stuff that SuperAntiSpyware and/or MalwareBytes says it removed, but then returns on reboot. I finally had to use ComboFix to actually get it, once and for all, then I follow-up with deep scans by three other products to be extra safe. All the bad stuff's finally gone, now...
...and once it WAS gone, I suddenly noticed (and this may seem irrelevant, but just bear with me, here) that the "Network Meter" (by addagadget.com) in my Windows Sidebar was suddenly able to detect the external IP address again... something (and here's why I mention it) which it had mysteriously lost the ability to do... now that I think about it... around 10 days ago. Hmm.
So, now it occurs to me that it's entirely possible that this mysterious "SndTaudio" thing has nothing to do with Sound Taxi at all; and that, instead, it is something that maybe gets installed along with certain kinds of malware. I'll be researching THAT more today, too, after I finish this posting.
But one thing I wanted to do here, at the very least, is share with everyone how I finally resolved the problem...
First let me say this: There are all manner of products out there which can help one determine and control what software and/or drivers and/or services will auto-start or auto-run when Windows starts. Of course, one can use MS-Config, but there are downsides to that... including that something disabled in it can mysteriously later disappear from the list of possibilities, thereby making it difficult to re-enable if one ever wishes. So I, personally, use the free "AutoRuns" utility from SysInternals to do all my controlling of what gets to auto-startup with Windows. It's really amazing... and, like most SysInternals stuff, a little too powerful (and by that I mean "dangerous") in the hands of a novice... but I digress, again... sorry... again.
At any rate, I simply opened AutoRuns and used the "Find" function to find the, as it turns out, one and only occurance of "SndTAudio" among the seemingly zillions of startup entries; and I simply unchecked it so that it wouldn't auto-start with Windows. Of course I could have restarted in safe mode, or maybe used the free "Unlocker" utility to forcibly delete the "SndTAudio" drivers folder... but I'm not yet sure how it got there, yet, and whether some software on my machine might need it... so I don't, yet, want to do anything like that. But I did want the darned thing to stop auto-running at startup so that maybe the multiple, redundant instances of it on the "Playback" tabe of my "Sound" dialog disappear. So I simply unchecked it in AutoRuns. Then I closed AutoRuns. Then I rebooted.
Then I re-opened Control Panel -> Sound and, lo and behold, all the redunant occurances of "SndTAudio" were gone, leaving only the Conexant devices... which is as it SHOULD be.
Then I ensured that my "Conexant High Definition SmartAudio HD2 Speakers" was reset to the default output device; and I also configured it, and checked properties, and tested it to make sure it was working absolutelly correctly. Then I clicked "Apply" and then "OK" to exit.
Then I went back to RadioSure's advanced options settings and made sure that it was using the "Conexant High Definition SmartAudio HD2 Speakers" device for output. Then the acid test: I selected an Internet radio station in RadioSure and clicked on its "Play" button and... VOILA!... it was working again!!!!!
Oy. What a pain in the rear!
So, bottom line: I don't know what in the heck this "SndTAudio" thing is, or how it got onto my machine, or why it ridiculously installs so darned many instances of itself, how one of said instances got set as my default audio output device, or (and this is a big one) why it seems no one on the Internet either knows much about it, or cares...
...but danged thing ain't buggin' me now!!!!
[sigh]
When I have time, I'm going to research the crap outta' this and figure it all out. I'm hoping that others in this thread, or who read it after having stumbled onto it from Google searching, will get out there and try to figure out what it's about and then come back here and post about it.
Even if SndTAudio is a legitimate thing that some software on my machine actually can use -- or maybe even needs -- the darned thing is about as badly-behaved as anything I've ever seen in my 32 years of IT experience... which is reason enough, in my opionion, to not take it seriously... and to remove it altogether. Like I said, I want to seriously research it (either that, or benefit from someone else's having done so and posted about it in a place like this) before I actually remove it. For now, it's disabled, and that's good enough. I virus-scanned the SndTAudio folder that I found and nothing in it seems to be malware. So it can't hurt to just sit there, disabled, 'til I figure it all out. And so that's what I'm going, for now, to do.
If anyone else can chime-in with useful information, please do.
In the meantime, I hope that maybe this posting, long though it is, has shed some light on it; and has also maybe suggested a way that th thread-starter and others might ameliorate their respective audio situations... maybe even resolve the problem, as I now have.
Good luck!
_____________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
gregg@greggdeselms.com
Napa, California
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