Restarting sound service?

Question

My macbook pro running Snow Leopard stopped making sounds a couple hours ago. I've found other reports of people with sounds working through headphones, but that's not the problem I'm seeing. I get no sound when my headphones are plugged in either.

I'm wondering if there's a LaunchAgent or LaunchDaemon to restart which would remedy this. I've already tried killing the coreaudio daemon (and it dutifully automatically restarted) but that didn't fix it.

I need to reboot for an OS update, so I think that'll probably rectify things.

Is there another way?

Answer 1

You can kill the CoreAudio process by opening Terminal and running sudo kill -9 `ps ax|grep 'coreaudio[a-z]' | awk '{print $1}'`. It will restart automatically after a couple seconds.

That fixes some problems my aging MBP has been having, where it sometimes fails to detect headphones or decides the speakers aren't connected. No guarantees it will work for every audio problem, but it's worth a shot.

Edit: added an ending ` to the code. I have to add this explanation because I can't edit otherwise. Source: zakgreant on macosxhints forums.

Answer 2

In my experience, a reboot is required to fix this. It's a poor fix since it seems to recover from the failure and not address the root cause. I would like to have, but have not yet discovered if there is another quicker/simpler method to get sound back...