Windows 10: Groove Music causing Audio Service to crash

I'm at my wit's end with this one... Spent around 2 hours googling the issue and nothing I came across was successful in solving the issue which is as follows:

Groove Music will run fine on its own, however after a solid 15 - 20 songs, (skipped or otherwise) it stops playing and presents an error stating it cannot find my audio device. When the error occurs, the speaker indicator in the task bar shows a red 'X' and when clicked, begins to troubleshoot. It then concludes that the Windows Audio Service is not running, and re-activates the service after a prompt. My audio begins to work again afterward, however I'm forced to restart any VOIP programs I'm running as they no longer produce audio, nor receive audio input from my microphone.

I've attempted many of the workarounds listed around google, including forcing an audio driver update, replacing my audio driver with the generic windows audio driver, and even running sfc /scannow in the command prompt which turns up no issues.

I love my music, and I'd love to listen to it while gaming without being interrupted by the audio service crashing, as this forces me to close my game, VOIP, and Groove, restart the audio service, then queue up all of my songs again in Groove, reconnect to the VOIP, and then FINALLY return to my game.

I used to run Realtek HD audio drivers, but I've moved to the generic windows audio drivers as many people have reported issues with Realtek's drivers on Win10. My system hardware should be listed either below or in my profile.

Is it possibly an updating issue with Groove? I've not noticed anything giving me notifications about updates, and all of my windows updates since the upgrade from 8.1 have gone smoothly.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: It seems there's a bit of a cue before the crash happens on skipping songs. At the start of a song, the volume will be very loud for about 10ms, then it returns to normal, but if the song is skipped, the crash occurs upon loading the next song in the queue. This doesn't seem to be the case for crashing by just listening to the songs, but its crashed twice since writing the main post; once after skipping, and once by simply listening. (Around 40min elapsed time)

UPDATE 2: Its been about a week since I submitted a ticket to Logitech's Support team and still no response... starting to expect to not get one at all.

:)

 

How do i uninstall groove music?

Groove is on the PC only. Samsung Music is NOT the Problem. It's OneDrive using.......OneDrive is Groove Music's audio input from the Groove Music version I have on my computer. OneDrive is using Groove Music's audio input, which I do not want to hear
cause it sounds bad. It's NOT the player either.

 

Show artists image in when browsing artists in Groove Music

My understanding is the images shown on the "Artist" page were downloaded BEFORE 2018.

The Groove Music app was designed to get artist images from Groove's online Image Service. As you know, artist images never look the same as album covers because they don't come from the audio file metadata.

Microsoft shut access to the image service on 31st Dec 2017. I suspect it was a side affect of shutting the Groove Music Pass streaming service. Access to their "API features" has been disabled, and that also included Artist Bio info (.the latest Groove
Music app update has even removed the "Artist Bio" feature).

The images used for the "Album" page come from the metadata embedded in your audio file and is unaffected by the shutdown of Groove online services / API. So albums show OK.

That's my interpretation. It would be nice for Microsoft to keep the image service for Groove Music apps even though Groove Music Pass has ended.

As evidence, I have a Lumia 1520 and noticed none of the new audio files I added to Groove Music app today received an Artist image (and I was online). Music added months ago retain artist images.

A network capture shows the Groove Music app is still communicating to musicimage.xboxlive.com when a new track is played. It seems to still attempt to fetch the image. There is some data exchanged but never any successful load of an artist image. I suspect
the online image service is rejecting the request and the Groove Music app is still coded to fetch. Again, I hope I am wrong and If it is meant to be still working and we can only hope Microsoft fixes it.

See Overview of the Groove Music API

*UPDATE* - Installed Groove Music on Android phone and 17 out of 24 artists received an artist image. On my W10 PC and Lumia devices I get zero artist images! All music from each device is sourced from OneDrive only.

• Success - Android. Groove Music v11.1121.1630 (2017).
• Fail - Lumia 930 with W10 Mobile with Groove Music on v10.18011.1341.0 (2017).

• Fail - Lumia 1520 with W10 Mobile with Groove Music on v10.17085.2231.0 (2017).

• Fail - Desktop PC W10 with Groove Music v10.18011.1271.0 (2018).
  

So the image fetching service is still working for Android but broken on Windows.

**UPDATE #2 3-Mar-18 **

Artist image fetching is working again on Groove Music for Windows 10 PC and the Lumia 1520. Still broke on the Lumia 930 which is running a newer version (latest) of Groove Music.

• Success - Android. Groove Music v11.1121.1630 (2017).
• Fail - Lumia 930 with W10 Mobile with Groove Music on v10.18011.1341.0 (2017).

• Success - Lumia 1520 with W10 Mobile with Groove Music on v10.17085.2231.0 (2017).

• Success - Desktop PC W10 with Groove Music v10.18011.1271.0 (2018).

 

As you love music, you will like MediaMonkey. You may find it better than Groove music.

 

Same exact thing is happening to me. I just spent a bunch of money building a new collection on Groove and I play World of Warcraft. My in game settings are borderless window and it does not matter which audio settings I use (headphone mode, no sound in background) I have tried them all. My Groove is on my second monitor playing my songs while I pvp on WoW. In an hour which is not very long when you are gaming and listening to music it will show an error on Groove player that my audio has crashed. I get the red x and have to click that and repair windows audio. It will fix in 3 seconds then I have to restart shuffle and switch an audio setting in WoW to get that to work again. I am using the Logitech G633 Artemis headset, a high quality expensive setup with no known bottlenecks or problems except this, the computer runs perfect. I have windows installed express, Norton suite from my internet provider, use Microsoft Edge as main browser, and there are buffering problems with Microsoft Edge too. Hope my info helps. My PC seems to be perfect til this.

P.S. I get no audio problems watching or listening to TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Twitter App, Steam, or Microsoft Edge, only Groove. I get the loud spike sound in the beginning of songs sometimes too. I also see that me and the main post both use Logitech drivers. Please help me make my computer perfect Microsoft!

 

Yeah I'm starting to think its conflicting audio drivers... there were some other threads here on tenforums about conflicts between Realtek HD and the win10 built-in... those conflicts were resolved by uninstalling either the built-in drivers or the Realtek drivers manually from Device Manager, but when I uninstall the built-ins, the audio runs perfectly for about 10 minutes (basically until windows decides to reinstall the built-ins)... I'm thinking maybe win10 doesn't recognize Logitech's audio drivers as the main controlling drivers, but rather as a secondary like a PCI sound card or something...

My headset's the G933 so basically the same as yours @Etny2k, just more expensive and wireless... but I don't think the model of headset matters so long as it uses the Logitech Gaming Software as the suite for its audio drivers... all that said, it'd be real nice if either this thread or any others that may be of the same issue get noticed by either Microsoft or Logitech so that it actually gets fixed...

I'm currently settling for MediaMonkey as was suggested by @Arc, but am unable to use my media macros (pause/play, next/previous song, etc.) while any window, other than Logitech's profiling software and MediaMonkey, is in focus, which kinda makes listening to music while gaming more tedious than it should be since I keep having to tab out... My guess as to this issue is that its simply not a windows based program so the key events that windows maps for media players doesnt work while tabbed out of the player... my songs also seem to play at different volumes than one another with MediaMonkey, but as the main post pretty blatantly suggests, I'd rather just use Groove, granted it worked...

Is there anyone else having this issue & also has Logitech headphones that use the Gaming suite for profiling? Make a small post if so please. The issue may be related to Logitech's Gaming drivers so I'd like to know for sure before I submit a support ticket to Logitech