some students cannot hear audio in IE11

[amybrush]

When my employees try to listen to online training, some of them cannot hear the audio when they are using IE11 - everything runs fine except the audio. However, when we ask them to use Chrome or Firefox, they can hear the audio just fine. Could this be an ActiveX filter problem or something else? IT and I are racking our brains to figure out what may be going on. Not everyone in IE11 is having this problem, just a small portion of them. Any ideas? Is it a setting within IE or could it be the LMS we are running the content through (which is Taleo).  Thanks!

[chrisguider]

If the issue isn't occurring for all employees who are using IE11 then it's most likely a setting issue in IE on the problem computers. If it was a problem with the LMS or the content it would happen in IE on all computers. I have two questions: does the issue always occur on the same computers, and does audio work in IE on other websites?

I would start troubleshooting by comparing the IE settings on a computer where the audio doesn't play to the settings on one where it does play. You want to open tools and then internet options and look under the Security tab and the Advanced Tab. If you can't find the issue there you can open the developer tools (F12) and see if you get any error messages. Maybe an add-on is interfering with the audio? If you haven't found the issue yet you can reset IE to it's defaults from the Advanced tab in the Internet Options. Make sure you restart your computer after doing this.

[RodWard]

These things can be maddening to try and track down on a corporate system because typically they have removed a lot of components that might be present on a normal 'out of the box' installation.  And it's also possible that some PCs are running old versions of DLLs that are no longer compatible.  These might only show up as issues when trying to run multimedia learning, which is NOT something normally classified as a mission-critical business application.

One thing I usually suggest is to try having the IT admins logging into the same PC with their user profile and then see if the issue goes away when a different profile with more security privileges is used.  If so, sometimes the quickest fix is to blow away the user profile and give them another one.  if the issue is still there even for the IT staff then re-imaging the PC hard drive is probably the next quickest fix.

[chrisguider]

Rod, I'm not sure maddening is a strong enough word! As an IT Professional who provides support to external clients I see things like this more often than I would like. If I could, I would advise everyone to never use IE for anything. Ever. (This is a feeling shared by many IT Professionals and quite a few Software Engineers.) Obviously, this is almost never an option. 

I agree with having an admin login and see if the issue persists but I still want to know if audio plays on other sites, the reason I want to know is this, if audio doesn't play anywhere it's a much bigger issue and will probably need to be fixed before the audio in the eLearning content will play and fixing this may fix the eLearning issue as well. If it does play elsewhere then I know the problem is only with the eLearning content.

I tend to only recommend reimaging to clients in dire situations, not because I don't think it's the quickest and easiest fix but because I don't know their environments or requirements for their systems I typically want the IT Technician to come to that conclusion on their own.