No captions or translated audio
These are two different failures with two different causes. Start from the one you are actually seeing.
Nothing appears at all
No captions, no voice, and the session never reaches Translating. Work down this list — it is ordered by how often each one is the answer.
- 1Check the tab is actually making sound
DubTab captures the audio of the tab, so a paused video or a page that has not started playing gives it nothing. Start playback first, then press Start.
- 2Check what kind of page it is
The browser blocks audio capture on its own pages.
chrome://URLs and the Chrome Web Store cannot be translated at all, and no setting changes that. - 3Read the dock state
Connecting that never becomes Translating is a network problem, not a settings problem. DubTab retries on its own and counts the attempts. If the count keeps climbing, stop the session and start it again — that clears a stuck connection more reliably than waiting.
- 1Check the audio source
If it is set to One specific app and that app is not the one making the sound, DubTab is listening to silence. Switch to Computer audio to confirm, then narrow it down again.
- 2Check the sound is playing on this computer
DubTab listens to what your machine plays. Audio going out to a headset over Bluetooth still counts; audio on a phone or a second machine does not.
- 3Read the session state
The HUD and the tray both show whether a session is live. A session stuck connecting is a network problem — stop and start it again to clear it.
Captions appear, but there is no voice
Captions and dubbing are separate. If the text is scrolling, transcription and translation are both working and the problem is downstream of them.
- 1Check the dubbing voice is switched on
This is the answer most of the time. With the translated voice off, a session produces captions and a transcript and no audio at all. See Choose a voice and adjust audio.
- 2Check the mixer faders
The translated voice has its own fader, separate from the original audio. A fader pulled to the bottom is silence, not a bug.
- 3On Windows, check the tray
The tray menu has its own mute for the dubbing, and it survives stopping and starting a session.
- 4Give it a few seconds on the first line
The voice starts after the first sentence has been heard, translated and spoken. On a slow first sentence that is a few seconds of silence, not a failure.
The voice works, but there are no captions
Check the caption mode. Audio Only is a real mode and it does exactly this — it gives you the translated voice with nothing on screen. Switch to Panel or Cinema to bring the text back. On Windows the tray also has a show/hide captions toggle that is independent of the mode.
Common questions
Why can DubTab not translate a Chrome Web Store page?
The browser does not allow extensions to capture audio on its own internal pages, which includes chrome:// URLs and the Chrome Web Store. This is a browser restriction, not a DubTab setting, and there is no way around it. Play the audio on a normal web page, or use the Windows app.
I get captions but no dubbed voice. What is different about those two?
Captions come from transcription and translation; the dubbed voice is generated after that and can be switched off on its own. If text is scrolling, the first two steps are working — check that the translated voice is enabled, that its fader is up, and on Windows that the tray has not muted it.
The session keeps reconnecting.
DubTab holds a live connection while translating, and networks that cut long-lived connections — some VPNs and corporate networks — will drop it repeatedly. Stopping and starting the session clears a stuck connection. Time spent disconnected is not translated, so it is not charged.