OS X Yosemite - sound problems?

I am running a Mac Mini 3,1 (early 09) with 8 gb ram, and 250 gb SSD

I have installed OS X Yosemite on my 2 computers. One is working fine but the other doesn't show any audio output devices and can't change the sound effects also. The startup sound is still there. I have tried few things but nothing is working for me. Please help me to solve the problem.

Count me in among the troubled. Mine sounds relatively minor though.

I'm running external speakers through an Audioengine DAC. It occasionally skips when I do something like switch spaces. Some of the things that have triggered a skip are pretty minor events... nothing that could tie up the processor or my SSD disk. Occasionally, the sound completely goes out and I have to turn my DAC off and back on to get the sound back.

I'm not zapping my PRAM. The basic tricks like that never work for me. They just give me a lot of settings to reconfigure. This kind of sound issue has happened to me with MacOS upgrades before. It's gone within a few months.

When I say this happens to me occasionally, I do mean only a few times an hour and usually in clusters.

I think I figured out at least part of my problem. I'm running out of memory. This wasn't a problem in Mavericks. Things are either eating up more memory or applications aren't handing off unused memory as well.

I have been struggling with this for a while. This problem did not exist before Yosemite.

I have an older iMac (late 2008) that works just fine otherwise. But out of the blue I will do something that requires audio, like going to YouTube or playing songs via iTunes, or a video on my system and the audio will be completely gone, except for "system sounds" like errors and emptying the trash, etc. Rebooting does no good. Resetting PRAM does no good. The only thing I have found that fixes the problem is to Cmd-R during a boot and restore the OS. That's gets pretty old after a while!

I originally thought that maybe it was the Legacy Java6 driver that I needed to install to run a couple of programs but this last time I just didn't install it and later still got the problem. I also thought that maybe it was a Torrent software problem. I was running Transmission and the audio went out a couple of times, so I switched to uTorrent. Then the audio went out while that was running. Hard to say if this was just coincidence or not.

I did find a good article on audio failures from CNET here: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-reset-the-audio-system-in-os-x/ but I haven't tried those yet.

In any case, it's comforting to know that others have the same issue and that we all are struggling to understand what's going on.

Nevermind. I'm not running out of memory. Yosemite is just awful. The skip when switching space may have had something to do with memory, but I'm getting a far worse sound skip whenever I press a button on my Nionix mouse that's mapped to the return key. Pushing a macro key on my mouse is guaranteed to cause the sound to skip and if I press it several times in a row, the sound will die.

Ugh, I hate when I find the root cause of the issue and I find it in a mirror.

I needed to upgrade the SteerMouse driver that I use to power my otherwise non-Mac compatible input devices. I upgraded that to the latest version and my input devices play nicely with my DAC again.

The problem occurs on my Mac Pro (cylinder) only; in particular, after the unit wakes from hibernation, the sound controls don't work (they move, but no sound). "sudo pkill -i coreaudio" and quitting/restarting iTunes temporarily fixes it.

I listen to streaming music from di.fm -- some of the lower-resolution channels like 70s, 80s will SCREECH in iTunes -- it's a horrible sound. Sometimes going back-and-forth to different channels will solve it. But it will happen again; eventually, no sound at all from iTunes and I have to repeat the above steps.

This is seriously annoying!

My older Mac Pro (tower) with the same OS does not have this problem -- so, I'm presuming this is a system driver issue specific to the Mac Pro cylinder hardware.

The display sometimes blinks out too.

I've seriously considered downgrading iTunes, it's that frequent/bad of a problem. I've reported it via the iTunes Feedback form, too.

OSX 10.10.2 is released, the bugs are still present. Here's more of what I observed that I only see on the Mac Pro cylinder (2013):

* While playing certain streams (lower bitrate?) from di.fm, there is sometimes a LOUD screech.

* Sometimes if you bounce to another high bitrate channel, then back, it will work, other times it disables sound and you must restart iTunes

* System sound controls do not work after hibernation

* No feedback sound, but the animation on-screen is present

* You must kill -9 the "coreaudio" process, then restart iTunes and it works

It appears that this is some type of specific hardware driver issue, as I have the same exact configuration on at least three Mac Pro towers and I don't have this problem, same OS and software versions.

Other folks who are experiencing this, chime in? Have you sent feedback to Apple?

I just installed iTunes 12.1.0.50 and it "appears" the aforementioned bugs have been quietly addressed. As in, I did not see them specifically mentioned in the list of items fixed.

Same here, early mac 2011

Renders facetime useless unless used with earphones, strange... VLC or other players do not seem to have this problem....

This seems to have been resolved in the latest iTunes 12.1.0.50 -- since updating, I have not encountered the problem.

Seems it was silently fixed, as I didn't see mention of it.

Macbook Pro late 2011 running Yosemite.

This hasn't been fixed yet. I have applied all updates and yet still suffer with clicking and scratching from my internal speakers. Interestingly it started happening today as soon as I plugged headphones in. Unplugging the headphones didn't resolve the issue. I probably need to reboot again now. This issue has been here since release day of Yosemite.

Come on Apple. Fix it.

I to suffer from this Apple software/firmware oversight. It is an intermittent issue causing just a clicking sound when the sound hardware attempts to play a sound sometimes it takes two restarts or shutdowns to restore audio and then after awhile it stops working again. Apple please provide the necessary update to correct this issue. My hardware is an early 2011 13" MBP.

Bob