audiodg.exe process preventing me from ejecting my external drive on Windows 11

Hello, jmfrancis

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

Audiodg.exe is a process that handles the audio enhancements and effects for Windows. It is also known as Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation1 Sometimes, this process may interfere with other devices, such as your external drive.

There are several possible reasons why audiodg.exe is creating a file called elevoc_dnn_kernel.txt on your external drive. One reason could be that you have installed some software or driver related to audio processing, such as Elevoc, which is a company that provides voice and audio solutions. Another reason could be that audiodg.exe is trying to access some audio data or settings from your external drive, but fails to do so, and thus creates a temporary file to store the information.

If you want to prevent audiodg.exe from creating the file in the first place, you can try some of the following methods:

• Disable audio effects and enhancements for your audio device. You can do this by right-clicking the speaker icon on the taskbar, choosing Sound settings > More sound settings (under Advanced), right clicking your audio device, selecting Properties, going to the Enhancements tab, and checking the Disable all sound effects option.
• Disable the automatic volume adjustment feature for your audio device. You can do this by right-clicking the speaker icon on the taskbar, choosing Sounds settings > More sound settings, going to the Communications tab, and selecting the Do nothing option.
• Change the audio sample rate for your audio device. You can do this by right-clicking the speaker icon on the taskbar, choosing Sounds settings > More sound settings, selecting your audio device, clicking Properties, going to the Advanced tab, and choosing a different sample rate from the drop-down menu.
• Update the USB drivers for your external drive. You can visit the manufacturer's official website, download and install the latest version.
• Close all the files or apps on the external drive before ejecting it. You can do this by using the Task Manager or the Resource Monitor (You can search it in Windows search bar) to see which processes are using your external drive, and ending them.

If possible, try using a different external NVMe drive to see if the issue occurs with that drive as well. This can help determine if the problem is specific to the drive or if it's related to your system's configuration.

Yuhao Li

Microsoft Community Technical Support

OK. I hope everything will go well.

Alright, I will try these fixes. Thank you for your help.

Your event log doesn't show any abnormal or error messages. It only displays the normal operation of the Elevoc software. So, I suggest you try the methods I mentioned earlier and observe for a while. If you have any further issues, feel free to ask.

Hello Yuhao, thank you for your reply.

I do not have another NVMe drive that I can try to connect to see if the same problem happens. Though I checked Elevoc's website, and I see that Lenovo is a customer company, and my laptop is a Lenovo Legion 5, so that could be the cause. I mainly use this drive for virtual machines and some games, and I'm making sure that nothing is running on that drive before ejecting it. It's only the audiodg process.

Here's a link to the file if this can help you determine what's going on.

As I said in the initial question this isn't really a major problem, but I'll try the fixes you've listed.

Thank you for your help.