Okay - for anyone that ends up in the same place I did…
- Sample playback should seemingly never work when running via the editor, but should work in a browser. I was assuming that because samples did not work via editor, the same thing was causing silence in the browser; not the case.
- My issue was actually caused by the difference in file system when running exported for web - I was iterating through .wav files to load them as resources, but these do not exist once exported. Good explainers here and here.
Quite a simple problem once I knew the driver error is a red herring - not sure that it is made explicit anywhere that even though there’s the option to use samples as the default playback option even outside web, this will probably never work (at least, not on either of my two laptops anyway).