Blue Snowball Microphone not Working

[hiimstring3]

I've recently purchased a Blue Snowball microphone and have been trying to set it up, to no avail. I've already looked at my audio settings, and the microphone is not being recognized. I then went into devices manager and found it under 'other devices'. Now it shouldn't need drivers, it's supposedly plug 'n' play. If someone could give me an idea of what is wrong, that would be much appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Ryan Parker]

Firstly make sure that the USB connecting into the microphone itself is upright and matches the shape of the socket as that is a common mistake.

If that is not the issue than:

While the microphone is plugged in and unrecognized, open the Device Manager.
Then find the Blue Snowball in the list, it will most likely be something along the lines of "Unrecognized Device".
Right click it, and click uninstall.
Then unplug the cable from both the snowball and the computer, wait a while, and plug them back in.
It should now be recognized.

 

[Nathan Daley]

I had the same problem, and checked everywhere online and all the solutions were way to trivial to be a solution like unpluging it, or flipping the input plug. I finally figured whu the drivery wasnot working, it's because it shouldn't have one. When you plug it in windows assumes it needs a driver to run so it finds one but it doesn't work and you are left with an unrecognized mic. Steps to fix this are as follows:

1. Uninstall driver for the device
2. Disconnect mic
3. Plug it back in
4. When the bubble pops up that it's installing the driver click on it
5. A window should appear and near the bottom it should have a blue link that asks if you want windows to stop looking for a driver in windows update
6. It should then load and recognize the device as a blue mic

Note: The first time I did this it didn't work but it was because I was too slow on clicking the blue link, even though I still had tinto click it. If this happens repeat the process but step your game up and move quicker. Good luck

 

[brettsalt]

I came across a similar problem with my blue snowball, my computer wouldn't recognise the device and I couldn't find any advice anywhere.
I am not experienced with this sort of thing so I decided to contact a local computer repair company (http://www.stellasoft.co.uk/computer-repairs-frome/)

They fixed it for me, they said that it was because of the drivers.

 

[Ejmaster101]

I had the same problem, and checked everywhere online and all the solutions were way to trivial to be a solution like unpluging it, or flipping the input plug. I finally figured whu the drivery wasnot working, it's because it shouldn't have one. When you plug it in windows assumes it needs a driver to run so it finds one but it doesn't work and you are left with an unrecognized mic. Steps to fix this are as follows:

1. Uninstall driver for the device
2. Disconnect mic
3. Plug it back in
4. When the bubble pops up that it's installing the driver click on it
5. A window should appear and near the bottom it should have a blue link that asks if you want windows to stop looking for a driver in windows update
6. It should then load and recognize the device as a blue mic

Note: The first time I did this it didn't work but it was because I was too slow on clicking the blue link, even though I still had tinto click it. If this happens repeat the process but step your game up and move quicker. Good luck

OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! IT WORKED FOR ME!!!!!

 

[wasabi091915]

Nathan Daley

I had the same problem, and checked everywhere online and all the solutions were way to trivial to be a solution like unpluging it, or flipping the input plug. I finally figured whu the drivery wasnot working, it's because it shouldn't have one. When you plug it in windows assumes it needs a driver to run so it finds one but it doesn't work and you are left with an unrecognized mic. Steps to fix this are as follows:

1. Uninstall driver for the device
2. Disconnect mic
3. Plug it back in
4. When the bubble pops up that it's installing the driver click on it
5. A window should appear and near the bottom it should have a blue link that asks if you want windows to stop looking for a driver in windows update
6. It should then load and recognize the device as a blue mic

Note: The first time I did this it didn't work but it was because I was too slow on clicking the blue link, even though I still had tinto click it. If this happens repeat the process but step your game up and move quicker. Good luck

Thanks for this. Was slightly different under Windows 10 but same basic idea.

Under Windows 10:
1. When you plug it in Windohs will automatically install the driver.

At this point, I was seeing it listed under Control Panel > Sound > Recording Devices (volume bar moved and everything) and I was seeing it Device Manager. However, when I would try to set it up as the microphone for Windows Speech, I would click through to the screen where you're supposed to start talking and then get this lovely error:

The computer doesn't appear to have a microphone connected to it that supports Speech Recognition. Please connect a supported microphone to the computer and try again.

At this point, I tried doing the uninstall / replug trick but wasn't seeing any bubble pop up. SO... here is what worked for me:

2. Open Device Manager > expand "Sound, video, and game controllers".
3. You should have an entry for "Blue Snowball". Right-click it and uninstall the driver.
4. REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER
5. If you go back into Device Manager, you will see that it has been reinstalled automatically again. But WSR should allow it now.

 

[AlfaWolfxxx]

I know this is 2 years ago but, i have the exact same problem with a blue yeti blackout and i did exactly what you mentioned above, but didnt work! any suggestions?
it was working perfectly fine a few days ago, but suddenly it stopped picking up sound, i had windows 7 btw, now im on windows 10 and still have the issue!! any help would be appreciated.

 

[wasabi091915]

TLDR; if you just want it to work with Windows Speech Recognition (WSR), skip to the end and try the registry hack.


So... I just happened to be going through a clean install of Windows 10 for an entirely different issue and I retried my steps above with no success. I started going through and trying a myriad of different things while keeping very detailed notes.

At one point many uninstall/unplug/replug/reboot cycles in, I decided to try doing the setup via settings instead of launching my WSR shortcut for it. Got the same "Peter talks to his computer..." dialog, this time without any error pop-ups. Although it mentioned Cortana this time instead of WSR. Then I went back to control panel, skipped the mic setup, and went straight to train your computer. Was able to go through several screens without any problems (didn't complete it, was just testing). At that point, I started thinking that maybe WSR is just getting stuck on something...

Since my mic was obviously working with the default drivers, I decided to see if I could get WSR to quit being an idiot. After playing around in the registry, I found that simply changing one value did the trick. No more restarts/mucking around withh drivers.

So, assuming you just want it to work with WSR and it is already picking up sound in the dialogs I described above, the below command should do the trick. I'll probably end up doing another clean install sometime in the near future and will try to confirm if any mucking with the drivers is required at all or not prior to this. I suspect that the default driver might be just fine and WSR is the only one with the hang-up.

from command prompt run (all on one line):

reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Preferences" /v "en-US_CompletedSpeechConfiguration" /t REG_DWORD /d "0x00000001" /f

(and then re-launch WSR)


EDIT: I'm also assuming that if you use a locale that is *NOT* en-US, then you may need to browse to the above in regedit and make the same change for whatever the corresponding value is named in your locale.