Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Audio Bug

So for those of you who have made the switch like myself to 10.6 you may or may not have noticed when you reboot your audio settings seem to change themselves.  I searched around the web and found this issue mostly affecting users who upgraded from a previous version of OS X such as 10.5, but that's not to say they're the only ones affected by this issue.

So what's the deal?  Well the audio preferences are stored in /Library/Preferences/Audio, and if you take a look at the files in there you'll see they're owned by _coreaudiod and you may see a few files like com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist, and com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist, I also had a .plist-old version of both files which was probably left over from the upgrade.  So to resolve this issue I moved all the files in the directory to a folder on my Desktop for backup and then opened up System Preferences and went into the Audio preferences and set my settings back to where I like them, and took another look in the directory and found it re-created com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist with a slightly larger size then the original file I just backed up, 1900 bytes versus 1981, maybe the file was corrupt..

So close all applications, reboot and you should notice all of your audio settings are still set where they should be.

This could probably be solved using Disk Utility permissions repair as well, but I haven't tried that method yet.