No Audio in Risk of Rain

I installed Risk of Rain though Steam and everything was fine until a few days ago, but now I can hear neither sound nor music. Audio works fine in other applications, and I've checked the in-game settings and audio mixer.

The error log reports:

ERROR in
action number 5
of Create Event
for object oInit:

Error defining an external function.

What I've tried

  • Reinstalling the game
  • Restarting Windows (Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit)
  • Sacrificing 79 health at a life shrine
  • Verifying the game cache
  • The included FAQ recommends uninstalling and reinstalling Visual C++ in the _CommonRedist folder in the event of no audio. I've deleted the folder and allowed Steam to reacquire it.

Uninstall Redistributable 2008, 2010, and 2012. All of them. Restart your computer. Then go to your steam folder where Risk of Rain is. Then click on _CommonRedist folder then the vcredist folder. Install the files from the 2008 folder, the 2010 folder, and the 2012 folder. Some of the folders may be empty, but for the others, there should be 2 installers per folder. Run all of them. Restart your computer, this is necessary. Then try to run the game.


There's one potential solution that I've found which doesn't involve restarting your computer or messing around with C++ installations.

  1. Exit Risk of Rain
  2. Then close anything using Flash (ie: web browsers, other games, etc)
  3. Restart Risk of Rain normally

For me, this issue manifested when I had some YouTube videos open in Google Chrome then started up Risk of Rain. Closing the specific tabs wasn't enough; I had to close Chrome itself before the sound worked properly.