This started happening just a day or two ago – everything will be working fine, and then suddenly all game sound stops. Other sound works properly. No amount of playing with audio settings within the game brings the sound back, but quitting and restarting the game (not rebooting the Mac) gets it working again. Anyone else seen this?
1 Like
- What Mac do you have?
- Do you have Microsoft Teams installed?
Edit: Duh…MBP from thread title. I’m losin’ it… Still need #2 answered though. 
I haven’t had a Microsoft product installed on a personal machine since the mid-90’s. 
Having no sound on a M1 Max Mac Studio. Occasionally I can get it to play on headphones, but speakers? Nope. And for whatever reason, no microsoft anything installed here either.
This happens to me as well. Sometimes I’ll go days without it happening, then sometimes it happens in hours or even minutes. Very frustrating.
In the sound settings it will say something like “NoSound Driver” for the output and there will be no other options. Only way to fix it is to exit and restart the game.
This hasn’t happened to me since a few days after my initial posting. What is still happening is occasional, momentary silence. Everything will be normal, and then suddenly there’s no sound for just a second, and then it goes back to normal.
Do you remember changing anything prior to the bug resolving? I’ve been suffering for months with this nonsense!
I’ve had this for years actually. In my case I attributed it to being on a hackintosh and using unorthodox methods to enable HDMI audio via the GPU, but it also happens on my original Mac Pro 1,1 as well. It isn’t a WoW specific issue, that I can tell you now. Something in the drivers in macOS causes an audio event PID to become invalidated and reset the audio device after a moment or two.
In the case of playing something in QuickTime (or QT Pro as that has export options I use that QT X does not) the audio stream will cut out once or twice and then just stop until I close the file and reopen it and listen to it again. It only happens in QT though, not with VLC and not with emulation apps like Audio Overload or M1 Arcade Music Player. Doesn’t even happen in CrossOver when I’m using WinAmp to listen to my VGM files (sorry Richard Bannister, NotSoFatso and Alpha II >>>>>>> Audio Overload).
Not sure why it only affects some hardware, but it’s definitely a macOS issue.
The issue with wow is it kinda doesn’t do a good job repopulating it, or populating it in first place in some cases. I think the sound driver wow uses is dated and could use updating to maybe address some of the more serious issues it has. I remember when I’d use something as simple as screenflow to capture audio/video from wow and wow would lose all audio devices second I started it because when it’d hook one, it’d cause them all to reset for like half a second (they’d just fail to repopulate in wow)
No, sorry. My best guess was that there was a new release, but I haven’t been paying close enough attention to know if that actually happened.
Interesting — I’ve never experienced it before, dating back to the 1990’s and various iterations of every chip family they’ve used in that time. I’ve certainly had other issues, like just terrible performance with games from companies that didn’t bother to develop native versions and just slapped on a WINE wrapper, or the infamous Magic Mouse Bluetooth reset problem, but this audio cutout thing is new to me.
Happily it does seem to be happening less now than it was last week. Just had one blip in the past three days, vs a couple an hour for a while there.
The cutout has been a random bug in macOS since 10.6.5, the same OS that introduced the MIDI file bug where volume in MIDI exports is so low that even at “reference level” (0 dB on an AVR) they can be hard to hear. CoreAudio has been a shambling mess ever since it was introduced to be honest. It’s more exacerbated in WoW due to the FMOD libs Blizzard uses.
Has this been fixed for you?
It’s happening to me, too.
Mac mini … all goos til last week or so … game works fine, then sound drops … completely. No way to get it back on but restarting the game … very frustrating !