Powershell can be used to retrieve audio drivers or sound card driver information on your computer. Powershell commands or directives can be used to find the audio card and driver information for local or remote computers. We review the process to find the sound card driver in Powershell.
Process to find sound card driver in Powershell
The process to find the sound card driver in Powershell involved the following steps:
- We will find the sound card manufacturer
- We will pull the sound card information in detail
- We will check the sound card driver file location and information in terms of the version of the driver file on the computer
Launch the Powershell on your computer by typing the pwsh command in the search box. Once the Powershell has opened on the computer, we will follow the process in the exact sequence shared here.
Use CimInstance to find the sound card manufacturer on the computer using Powershell
The first step to finding audio device information for a computer using Powershell is to find the manufacturer of the sound card. For this we will use Powershell CimInstance as per the command shared below:
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_SoundDevice
This Powershell directive will pull the audio drivers on your computer and list the details of the sound card manufacturer on the computer. The command output is displayed hereunder. We are interested in knowing the manufacturer of the sound card on the computer.
We will make use of the Win32_SoundDevice class to retrieve the sound card manufacturer on our computer.
We see that the sound card manufacturer is Realtek and the name of the audio device is ‘Realtek High Definition Audio’. Now, we need to find the sound card driver software or file on the computer. For this, we need the sound card manufacturer because we will filter the results based on the sound card manufacturer.
Find the sound card driver file and path
We will use the Win32_systemdriver class to find all the drivers that are manufactured by ‘Realtek’
Get-WMIObject win32_systemdriver | ? caption -match ‘Realtek’ | Format-list *
The command output of this Powershell directive will display all the driver information for devices manufactured by Realtek. This would also include the actual sound card driver’s name and location.
The command output below shows the results of using the command shared above.
From the data that comes up on the screen after using the WMIObject directive, we can see that the audio driver for the Realtek sound card is RTKVHD64.sys. The full folder location of the driver file is also shared.
Find version of the sound card driver using Powershell
Now that we know the sound card driver file and location, we will validate the version of the sound card driver on the system.
(Get-item C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\RTKVHD64.sys).versioninfo
The output from this command lists the audio driver file and its version. We can see that the product version or the audio device driver version on the computer is 6.0.9025.1.
Closing thoughts
In this document, we were able to find the sound card device manufacturer. From the manufacturer, we were able to find the sound card driver file name and exact path location of the audio card driver of the computer.
Once we have the sound card manufacturer and name of the device driver, we can fetch version details of the sound card driver through the Get-Item directive.
The same set of commands can be used for local or remote systems. For remote systems, we suggest using PSExec for Powershell remoting.
Suggested Powershell Tutorials
You may like to read the following content related to Powershell:
- How to enable Remote Desktop using Powershell?
- Get CPU temperature using Powershell
- Get all hotfixes installed by date in Powershell
- How to find stopped services using Powershell?
- How to find running services in Powershell?
- How do I check if a directory exists in Powershell?
- How to get the first few lines of a file using Powershell?
- How to find the properties of an event log in Powershell?
- How to get event logs for an event using Powershell?
- How to export event logs to CSV file using Powershell?
Rajesh Dhawan is a technology professional who loves to blog about smart wearables, Cloud computing and Microsoft technologies. He loves to break complex problems into manageable chunks of meaningful information.