Audio/Sound fails in macOS Catalina

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

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.

How do you restart coreaudiod ?

This solution can crash your computer. If the kext fails to unload, the script will attempt to execute the second line, which will crash the computer, and send it into a reboot.

I don’t write a lot of shell scripts, so I’m not sure how to do it, but execution of the second line needs to be within an if clause that tests for successful execution of the unload.

It’s probably better to unload and load outside a shell script.

Thank you, but I have not this driver there. :(

Edit: I have the feeling, that it could be Sonos and Spotify Connect.

Every time, I’m playing songs in Spotify with Spotify Connect on my Sonos, it happens, that the system sounds are gone.

Best

Sascha

I have the same issue. Restarting audiocored does not do the trick for me. I had it on the previous OS too, was hopeful updating to Catalina would solve the issue but no. I have not found a solution other than restarting the machine. So frustrating :(

Killing coreaudiod doesn't help for me. To re-iterate, here's what i'm experiencing

I have a Bose USB Audio speaker system connected to an LG Monitor (bought from apple store) using a USB-A to USB-C Adapter. The LG Monitor is plugged into my 16" Macbook Pro running Catalina via one of the USB-C ports.

To simplify:

Bose USB Audio (USB-A) --> LG Monitor (USB-C) --> Macbook Pro (USB-C)

1) On Macbook Pro, open Music app

2) Play a song (via Apple Music)

3) Pause the song

4) Press play again - no audio. At this point I tried resetting coreaudiod, did not work. Only way I can get audio back is to unplug the USB-C cable and plug it back in. Very frustrating.

The kicker is that the above doesn't always reproduce it every time. Sometimes I can pause and play music fine, other times I cannot. Also occurs when waking the computer up from sleep. Also occurs when switching applications that use the audio, such as video conferencing.

Any help is appreciated.

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.

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?

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.

Hey Guys from Apple,

I have a small hope you are tracking such threads here. I am facing the same annoying issue on my MacBook Air 2019 with OS X 10.15.4. To be honest 10.15.3 has the same bug on board. Staying and working from home as most of us, having lot's of business conferences every day - the issue with crashing device makes me completely disappointed.

All of us been trained about workarounds (refer to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063) and how to dance with tambourine after each crash of the coreaudiod.

Please fix that kindly immediately and save our souls. I am close to submitting the order for Lenovo as a replacement notebook.

Best regards,

D.

Apple, can we not get something done about this? What an utter disappointment that this has not yet been corrected. This has been an issue since the beginning of OS Catalina and has not been addressed AT ALL in any updates. Not even acknowledged! Where is the competence with this enterprise? Restarting coreaudiod DOES NOT WORK. It's not a fix, it's not even a workaround! Even rebooting doesn't set things right again every time. FIX THIS APPLE!

I have the exact same issue.

At first, I thought my audio interface was the culprit but after uninstalling it and restart the iMac (Pro), I still have the same problem. When I go to the settings I see that the audio output popup jumps from Microphone Output to nothing each second or so (before, it jumped to the native output to my audio interface output).

OS: 10.15.5

I had hopes that this was the fix, but no. The behavior persists after this update.

Apple has utterly dropped the ball on this issue and seems to have no interest in legitimately fixing it.

Very disappointing.

The reason the Music app sounds terrible, is because Apple dropped the ball here. On my Macbook Pro running Catalina, music playback sounds so terrible, the app plays back the music losing the sound on one channel and sometimes when the sound comes back it is so low. It's so bad that i had to macOS Mojave on a virtual machine so i could use iTunes.