The Itch.io launcher is run by Itch and I just send the files to it. I don't know what the problem is in that case, but if the audio works from the manual execution then there's not much I can do about it. Hopefully it's just a driver problem and won't affect other games.
What file do you tell the launcher to launch? Maybe that’s the issue? If it’s the same file I mentioned with no extra parameters or anything, I have no idea.
Maybe it’s related to the command-line window that pops up on manually launching it (first line: [Begin Manager Boot]
)? Seems to initialize the SDL bits. Is it possible to intentionally run it without any of that CLI stuff, as the itch launcher seems to do, and would the same thing happen?
The command line window is part of the executable's configuration and I believe itch.io suppresses it. Those things are still running you just can't see them. There is a no-audio batch file in there and, at one point, someone else reported that the launcher was just autorunning whatever batch files it found so perhaps that is the issue.