#AUDIO SWITCH FOR MAC HOW TO#
#AUDIO SWITCH FOR MAC MAC#

Keep in mind that a PRAM reset may also change some of your other settings in addition to rebooting your sound. After that, your PRAM should have been reset.

#AUDIO SWITCH FOR MAC MAC#

During that time, your Mac might restart and you might hear the startup sound play more than once. Keep holding those four keys down for about 20 seconds. If your Mac has an Intel chip and you want to reset its PRAM, begin by restarting your Mac, then immediately press the Option + Command + P + R keys simultaneously. If you’re using an Apple silicon Mac, try shutting it down, waiting a few seconds, then booting it up again. Note that this does not apply to Apple silicon Macs, since they don’t have a way to do this. If the problem is shared across all audio sources, it might be time to reset your parameter random-access memory (PRAM), which Intel-based Macs use to retrieve basic settings for your Mac and connected devices. Try restarting that particular app by selecting it, then choosing the Stop button at the top of Activity Monitor to see if your audio recovers. Make sure the arrow next to %CPU is facing down - this will show your most memory-hungry apps at the top. You can check which apps are hogging your memory by opening Activity Monitor, then selecting the %CPU column. First, make sure the problem can’t be narrowed down to any particular app or service. If macOS is randomly cutting out the audio and then restoring it without rhyme or reason, there could be something wrong with how your computer is using memory. This can be one of the most frustrating issues to experience. You should only need to do this once, as macOS should remember your choice. Pick out your speaker options manually to circumvent this issue. As you may have guessed by now, macOS - especially when it is loaded onto a computer that’s connected to HDMI speaker systems - can get confused about which speaker to automatically pick. In the Output list, you should see options for all these devices, as long as they are connected. “What about my headphones, external speakers, or Apple TV?” you may be asking. This should restore audio to your native Mac speakers.

#AUDIO SWITCH FOR MAC HOW TO#

I even made a downloadable script in case you don’t know how to create it. It will check your volume leven every half a second and if it’s higher it will “ping” and show a notification and set it again on your volume limit. This will limit your volume to the one you set in maxVolume in line 31. = true Ĭonst ) Ĭonst PurrfectVolume = new Volimiter(“Purrfect volume 😸”, 25) This.app = Application.currentApplication() You can create a script in Javascript like this: I did it myself using Apple’s script editor. In my case I also wanted to limit the possibility of setting a higher volume. If your headphones are super loud or your hearing very sensitive, and the choices are still too high for your preferences, there’s a secret ultra-low setting that you can use on the Mac that’s a step above “Mute”.įor mobile users, iOS has a similar Volume Limit setting for the Music app, though it’s not system-wide. Just pick a setting that makes sense for your headphone usage. So just remember the volume value is understood by OS X as different for each audio output device that has a line-out connection (AUX or otherwise) and is connected, it’s smart enough to know when something is connected or not.Ĭheck out the video below showing how to set this up, it’s very easy to follow and implement: Just about every Mac keyboard also has volume adjustment keys that can make this process a bit easier or automated, but many Mac users don’t seem to know this is going on behind the scenes and the levels are different per device. Pay attention to how the output level is different in each screen shot, and if you try it yourself you’ll find that connecting and disconnecting audio output will show similar differences so long as you set them to be unique. Note how in this screen shot the headphones have been removed, showing the sound output as “Internal Speakers” instead: Or you can set them to be the same, but that doesn’t make as much sense. If you pull out the headphones you’ll notice the “Headphones” audio output will switch to “Internal Speakers”, and the audio volume output level will be different for the two. Note how the sound output shows “Headphones” in this screen shot, as headphones are connected: Go to the “Sound” control panel and adjust the slider for a Output Volume value for “Headphones” to what you want as the default volume.Go to the  Apple menu and choose the “System Preferences” option.Plug in your Headphones to the Mac output port.How to Set a Headphone Volume Level on Mac

Audio switch for mac