Audio/Sound fails in macOS Catalina

I agree with you about how disappointing it is that Apple doesn't post here.

Not what I expect from this brand.

I am facing the same problem on my MacBook Pro 2015 15 inch after i updated the Catalina OS to 10.15.6. My MacBook speakers are sounding weird now, before that speakers were working fine

Resetting Coreaudio worked on the first try (pulled from a google search)

In order to reset your core audio:

1. Launch the Terminal
2. Enter the following command: sudo killall coreaudiod
3. Then, simply press Enter (although you may have to enter your admin password as well).

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.

Same problem - no sound, and in the System Preferences, my computer actually couldn't see the internal microphone or speakers at all, so there was no audio input or output. Quitting the coreaudiod process via Activity Monitor or Terminal did NOT help for me, but what did work was doing an NVRAM reset (Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support). After the NVRAM reset, the sound came back, and it still worked after pausing a video and sleeping/waking the computer.



Agreed - my audio appears to be well and truly forked... when looking at the audio preferences panel, devices appear and disappear with no apparent correlation to anything. Most recently my Sound prefs pane crashed entirely and I had to restart System Prefs to get to it:

I have found that SOMETIMES if I kill all the audio processes (using the Activity Monitor app) it will restore things; sometimes I just need to shut down and restart.

I thought maybe this had to do with the audio output in my HDMI monitor (which I turned off on the monitor, but it still shows up as an option)... but it has started happening even when I am not using any external devices.

Apple, you guys REALLY need to do something about this. In a world where working remotely is the norm and we need to take all of our meetings via video conference, having flaky or non-working audio is a deal breaker. I REALLY don't want to have to downgrade the OS, or worse leverage my old Windows machine - please fix this.

I don’t think Apple will be fixing this issue anytime soon. It’s sad for all the faults people thought of iTunes at least the sound was great. This music app falls far below the standards of what we expect from Apple.

I just purchased a new laptop (MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2020 running Catalina 10.15.6) and am experiencing this as well. I wrote a script to kill core audio and that seems to help but it often happens in the middle of a meeting and I miss several seconds conversation. Obviously I'd prefer it if this didn't happen at all. I didn't experience this on my old laptop (MacBook Pro 15-inch, Mid 2015 running Catalina 10.15.4).

Try resetting NVRAM.

Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support

Hey, I have the same issue with my MacBook Pro and Catalina.

Sometimes the audio is gone and only come back if i restart the computer.

SMC/PRAM does help.

Best

Sascha

What you should is run MacOs Mojave on a virtual machine and use iTunes, until Apple gets on the ball and makes the Music App a functioning app worthwhile for us Apple users.