Audio/Sound fails in macOS Catalina

Restarting "coreaudiod" via Terminal does nothing for me. Interestingly if I also try to connect to my AirPods these also now don't work, in fact they connect then disconnect a few seconds later. Disabled Bluetooth, re-enabled, and still no joy. If I re-boot the MacBook, I know it will start audio again, but I really don't want to have to do that (again). This audio behaviour is unique to Catalina, I've never experienced it before. Apple, can you please sort this s*** out?

PS Not attempted the SMC reset yet, may do later but I know the re-boot step will generally make the audio issue temporarily go away.

Same issue here (MacBook Pro 2017), specifically after upgrading to Catalina. So this is a Catalina bug.

Restarting coreaudiod does not help; only restarting the entire system helps. This needs to be fixed.

I have an almost brand-new Mac mini. When I upgraded to Catalina, the same issue started. It seems to occur arbitrarily. I can go for days without issues, then I observe it several times a day etc. I reached out to Apple Support on Twitter and got some BS answer along the lines of "bring your Mac to the nearest Apple Store". Ummm, no? Because that would leave me w/o a computer for no reason other than Apple doesn't have their sht*t together. Basically, they need to fix this, and they need to fix this NOW. There are YouTube videos about, it. Support threads. You can Google it, Apple Support, and you'll find it is NOT an individual machine. Etc. etc. The following link has helped me, and it fixes it for a little bit, but it is not a long-term solution. This is BS, and now I'm researching how I can revert to my last operating system. It makes me rethink my decision to even get a Mac, and I thought PCs sucked - at least a PC doesn't come w/ the price tag of a Mac. Apple has been of ABSOLUTELY NO HELP. https://www.ikream.com/how-to-fix-sound-problems-on-your-mac-running-macos-mojave-32751

I think i found the problem. Are you guys using Parallels? If i dont start it, than restart and never reopen Parallels the audio works fine. When i start Parallels the audio bugs after some minutes/hours.

This is extremely annoying and I'm feeling like a Windows user who has to reset his computer all the time. Sometimes killing the coreaudio works but not always. All the "correlations" you guys are pointing out are not the cause because I can report that I have the issue and I don't use Spotify or Bose or Parallels, etc. This is an OS problem because I didn't have the problem before Catalina.

Same problem: closing the lid on my 2015 MBP on Catalina and then reopening leaves me with no sound. Using terminal to kill coreaudio gets sound back. You can also use Activity Monitor and force quit the coreaudio process.

Thanks so much, I had tried that, and it didn't work for me until I saw another reply on the thread that chrome also has an issue, so I switched to firefox after restarting coreaudiod and it worked. I think I had a combination of the two issues.

I do not show coreaudiod in my activity monitor. Ive searched the whole cpu and it does not exist. But I do have the same issue as everyone else. The sound disappears suddenly and a restart is the only fix. Very frustrating.

Any ideas why coreaudiod is missing?

This worked for me. Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. Under the CPU tab find (or search for) coreaudiod. Select it and then click the Stop button in the toolbar. When prompted, click Quit. This will restart the coreaudiod process and may bring your audio back.

And today none of it is working. Quitting coreaudio in activity monitor, using firefox (switching browsers helped once). Shouldn't have to reset the pram or whatever it's called now for an OS update. I usually wait a little longer to do these, sure will wait longer in the future. Audio is such a basic function for all programs, I can't believe this wasn't caught in testing.

Same problem here - brand new Macbook Air with Catalina. It happens while using wired headphones and I also noticed in the system preferences that the entire contents of the Audio device subsystem just disappear.

Usually when it happens it comes together with some event that causes a speed increase in the fans, to the point of becoming audible (I cannot explain if this caused by an increase in the CPU load or the load increase itself is caused by the intermittent failure of the sound subsystem, as the speaker icon in the menu bar appears and disappears randomly, sometimes in fast sequence).

A coreaudiod restart apparently solves the issue. But this is quite annoying - until I discovered the cause I had to restart the computer, as it often happens in the middle of videoconference sessions,

I feel almost "happy" to read I'm not the only one having to restart Coreaudiod after startup from activity monitor in order to get Audio running.

I spent hours trying to find what was messing sound on my MacBook Pro, and I finally made an Automator action that I run after start-up (launch Activity Monitor > search for Coreaudiod > kill it > close Activity Monitor).

After reading all of you, it's obvious for me that it is a bug.

Hope Apple will soon consider it.

A senior advisor told me to log into as test. Audio worked fine. Went back to regular login and it still works. He wanted us to stay on as test until 2 days from now and only login into regular account since we can't remember FB login. We'll see.

Strangely, in the logs the audio failures that can be fixed by restarting coreaudiod always coincide with a series of ASL log messages, with a format like:

"25 Apr 2020 at 02:04:05 coreaudiod[209]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4"

When the speaker icon on the bar starts "blinking" (like going on and off), I found stuff like this:

"25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:25 loginwindow[185]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:32 Skype Helper (Renderer)[30242]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:32 SystemUIServer[415]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:32 Google Chrome[402]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:32 Skype Helper[30246]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:32 corespeechd[698]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:32 Skype[30236]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:44 Quake3-UrT.x86_64[31814]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:52 NotificationCenter[438]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:52 mediaremoted[115]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:57:52 Google Chrome Helper[806]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 2914 - 0x4

25 Apr 2020 at 01:58:03 xpcproxy[31823]: libcoreservices: _dirhelper_userdir: 557: bootstrap_look_up returned (ipc/send) invalid destination port

25 Apr 2020 at 01:58:04 iconservicesd[31823]: BUG in libdispatch: 19E287 - 1775 - 0x1

25 Apr 2020 at 01:58:04 login[31824]: USER_PROCESS: 31824 ttys000

25 Apr 2020 at 01:59:03 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: Service only ran for 5 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 5 seconds.

25 Apr 2020 at 01:59:32 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: Service only ran for 4 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 6 seconds."