Output and Presets Disappear After Windows Update

Hi Joshua Losey, thanks for your post! Sorry to hear this is occurring! 

The SoundID Reference standalone app should keep your output presets and profiles loaded after performing some updates. Can you let us know whether these were relatively recent Windows updates made? Have you updated SoundID Reference in between these Windows updates? Thanks! 

Yeah, they were recent Windows updates (within the past few months), and I always keep my SoundID Reference up to date.

Hi Team,

My output keep disappearing, when I open the standalone version. and I'm updated to 5.9 on a Mac. Now it's saying no devices found for the selected device type. Please assist.

Hi!

It's the second time it happened to me (on mac), I lose again all my presets after this automatic updates! It's really, really annoying!

Last time I spoke with one of you and the finality was to restart the entire measurement! I don't want to do this any month!

I will do this again and save my preset somewhere on my computer but could you please fix the problem?..

Thanks you

In case it's helpful: I'm using Reference v5.9.0.37, I just did a Windows Update (KB5032189 & KB5032339), and my output/presets stayed as they should. I'm not sure exactly which previous updates caused SoundID to change. I looked at my update history, and it's possible that KB5031356 and KB5031445 were a couple of culprits. There may have been one or two other problematic updates before those, but I don't remember.

Hey Occibel, I just had this happen as well. Also on Mac and using latest version of SoundID reference.

I had done nothing to my Mac - no updates - just a restart and everything gone from the app. No knowledge it had ever been set up before.

Very frustrating.

I have been having this issue, too, since recently upgrading to Windows 11. It has happened now at least half a dozen times. This post has been labelled ‘Answered’, but I cannot see any real ‘answer’, in the sense of a ‘solution’, to the issue here.

If you can afford it, do yourself a favor and switch to some other software. I've been using Realphones for the past few months now, and it's definitely better than SoundID: better sound, better support, more options, no crashes or lost presets, no internet connection requirement, etc. Its interface is a bit overcomplicated, but I imagine most people would prefer that to whatever the hell Sonarworks did to their software. Reference 4 was alright, but SoundID is a huge step in the wrong direction.

Hi everyone, 

Let me jump in here and point you in the right direction, in case you are still getting stuck with this:

If your output presets disappear after a Windows update or similar change, it’s almost never caused by SoundID Reference itself. In most reported cases, the audio device goes missing at the system level, which prevents SoundID Reference from showing its associated presets.

This can happen, for example, when:

• A driver update causes incompatibility or corruption.
• The device is no longer detected/has been disabled in Windows for a variety of potential reasons.
• Windows Audio Engine configuration and/or the associated settings have been reset/altered by a system update.
• The device remains, but Windows/driver changes altered its identity (changed Device ID), so SoundID recognizes it as a new device too (the existing presets no longer apply).

Because SoundID Reference only lists presets for currently available devices, those presets will reappear automatically once the device is detected again. So before troubleshooting within SoundID Reference, always check whether the device is still visible in your Windows sound settings. If it’s missing there, that’s the root cause — not the app. One user summed it up perfectly after following this step:

Thanks for getting back to me. I realized that the settings were not lost, it is just that the outputs are not visible when my soundcard is turned off..

If your device is visible in Windows but presets are still missing, please let us know, and we’ll investigate it further.