Windows 11 Bluetooth no sound/microphone and crashing

I think I might have some sort of a solution!

I've been using it for the last couple of hours and it seems to work!

This solution only enables me to use the headphones on hands-free mode (the mode with the low quality audio + mic) so it's not suitable for listening to music or anything like that.

Basically the idea is to trick windows to use the mic all the time, that way the auto switch to audio mode (which was introduced in win11 - see here, and I believe is the one causing this issue) won't trigger and the headphones will remain in the hands-free mode.

Here are the steps I did -

• Preparation Step (only need to do once) do this when you're headphone are disconnected. Not sure if this one is needed but haven't yet tested without it.
  • Go to control panel
  • Click on Sound (make sure you're not in "View by: category" mode so the Sound icon appears)
  • Click on the Recording tab
  • Right click and disable each one of the recording devices except for your headphones.
• Day to Day use - we now want the headphones to start in hands-free mode and stick to it
  • Once again, open the Sound setting and click on the Recording tab
  • Connect your headphones
  • Now, the recording tab tries to use the mic on the headphone to display the sound level, so the headphones should be in hands-free mode. As long as you keep this window open, the headphones should remain in that mode.
  • You can now go into zoom/google meet/teams/any other video conference app you use

As I said, this worked for me for the past day... even made some zoom calls and people were actually able to hear me again :)

Let me know if this helped you!

This is just ridiculous... Can't believe how such a basic thing is broken so badly... and especially now that so many of us are working remotely and are dependent on our headphones for video conference calls...

I have two pairs of different bluetooth headsets, a QCY T5 and a Sony wf-1000xm3 and I can't get sound in either one of them!

Disabling hands-free mode brings the sound back but then I can't use the mic which I need for zoom calls!

Thanks for posting this. I was going crazy thinking there was something wrong with my laptop/headphones since I couldn't find anyone else reporting the same issue for MONTHS

I have no idea how this is still an issue. It's driving me absolutely mad!

UPDATE FOR YOU:

After spending the past few hours going crazy submitting feedback and diagnostics for this, I eventually reached out to Microsoft support. They indicated to me that it's a known issue and they are currently working on a bug fix which will be rolled out in a future update. How far into the future will it be? Who knows, hopefully not too far into the future.. But at least they're aware of it and working on it, hopefully it's a priority fix for them.

P.S. This is happening on BOTH of my computers, one of them I updated back in November and it started doing it. The other laptop I just bought YESTERDAY for $1900 (top of the line) and it came with factory installed Windows 11 Pro (not even updated from Win10), I'm so infuriated right now! I was so hopeful that spending $1900 on a brand new laptop with preinstalled Win11 Pro would fix this, but it didn't..

ME TOO!

Wow, I've been dealing with this for the better part of a year. I wanted to blame Dell, really, and now it seems this is a MS issue. Thanks for posting the update. Wish MS would get on this fix: this is a big problem for me (when I try and use a BT headset for mic+audio, it crashes the program, whether Zoom, Teams, or Skype). BT Audio output alone isn't an issue; just when I use the headset as output/input.