Sudden sound loss

Hi. I am experiencing very sudden sound problems: no sound while playing MPG's in Quicktime (every other format is fine), or while watching Flash videos in any browser (ie YouTube, etc). I've un/re-installed Quicktime to no avail.
This problem was definitely not happening just a short time ago...not sure what might have happened. Any ideas are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
G5 iMac (iSight) Mac OS X (10.4.7)

If repairing permissions and/or restarting didn't work, then try the following:
KB article - No sound from some applications, but system alert sounds play (Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4)
Another trick: If you have GarageBand installed, open it and then quit.
Good luck!

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Ipod to stereo sound loss

I've been searching a bit for this, but has anyone noticed some serious sound loss when connecting ipod to stereo or television and trying to play music? I've used it for TV and I didn't notice any major loss, but for music (using the standard headphone jack to white and red plug), it *****! If I turn the stereo up full ball it still lacks any punch (on a cd it would deafen me at this level). I want to buy a car stereo with an aux imput, but don't want to if it's not going to be loud. The ipod is new, so just want to know if this is normal?

I have used all of my 4 iPods as the main source for music connected to my living room stereo for years throug a docking station. (Not through the headphone output.)For my stereo i think the "latin" equalizer setting is closest to CD sound, but that varies. The sound is very close to CD sound and I do not lack any punch. I am using the same set up in the car and no problems there either. With the latest docing station the volume on the iPod has to be on full, but it automatically goes to full volume when docking.
By the way, I am using it with to stereos, One Denon and one Bose.
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Intermittent Sound Loss (SFX & Audio)

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I'm having an unusual problem with my iphone 4S. When I'm making a call, it suddenly sounds like my call has been invaded by aliens! Why is it doing this? I'm also having problems sending texts. Sometimes it sends sometimes it doesn't.

I'm having an unusual problem with my iphone 4S. When I'm making a call, it suddenly sounds like my call has been invaded by aliens! Why is it doing this? I'm also having problems sending texts. Sometimes it sends sometimes it doesn't. What is going on? Can it be fixed? I'm really not liking this new phone!!!!

Could be an issue with your Carrier and/or location...
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Restart.. Reset.. Restore from Backup... Restore as New...
Try a Reset...
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http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1430

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Thanks Ziad2000, I have already tried to restore to factory defaults, and the problem continues, let me make a broader explanation of the problem. I acquired my phone almost a year ago, and everything was working just fine, I bought an iPhone dock station and after a few uses of it, the problem started. I do not know if everything is related to this item.

IMac suddenly sounds alarm.

My iMac 21" (model 11.2/ 3.6GHz/ IntelCore i5/ system: 10.6.8) suddenly sounds off a loud alarm from standby/sleep mode.
I have searched the net and the alarm sounds like a RAM integrety-test alarm: 3 beeps and a 5 sec. pause etc.) The computer shuts down, but I can restart without any problems.
I have run a hardware-test from my dvd to check the RAM, but no error was found. (I ran both the normal and the advanced test)
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This just happened today at my wifes office with her 21inch Imac i5. One of the girls was working and then all of the sudden the alarm as you describe it started. And starts back up upon a reboot as well?
Could this be a hardware / fan failure?

Mac Air- Sudden sound disappearance

Just like many of the Mac Air users, my sound suddenly disappeared. NO sound, no icon. I tried every suggestions recommended in this forum. Finally I brought it in to the Genius Bar who couldn't fix it and had to send it in for service.
After 2 days I got a phone call to inform me that the problem was caused by the dent on the cover and that it will be $400+. I don't remember any dent and based on what I've been reading in this forum and others, it seems to be other problem instead of any such dent!
Although I have Apple Care, changing the hard cover is not covered by such insurance.
I don't know.. I feel like they are just blaming on such because they don't know what is causing it. It has been only a few months since I got my computer. It really makes no sense that a computer that is advertised as a sturdy one is actually so fragile. I think what they are telling me is total BS...

My MBA had no sound for a while, there were no hardware to choose/select in the system preference nor in About this MAC option.
I've tried everything possible (other then sending it in for repairs) to restore the sound.
Well long story short. I had order a hard shell cover for my MBA. During the process of snapping on my cover, my sound came back! I couldn't believe it, I thought it was from something other than the MBA. I realize during the process of putting on the shell cover, I had to apply pressure at specific points on my MBA. I applied pressure to each location where the cover had a snap lever.
I believe this pressure may have push in the cabling / pins for the sound card. Since then I have not loss my sound capabilities.
I thought it might have been a fluke. Therefore I shut the MBA down and restarted it and I heard the startup sound. I did this several times to ensure it was working properly.
So far it has been two weeks and sound still works!
What do you have to loose? Try applying pressure (not too hard though) on the sides of the MBA, along the left and right sides of the monitor and the left and right of the keyboard. It may or may not work, but it is worth a try before sending the MBA in for repairs.
Good luck and I hope it works for those who are having sound problems with their MBA.
Regards,
I Am Webhead

HT4085 Audio sound loss after downloading iOS6 on my new ipad

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Crashes, sound loss, and other problems

Hello,
I have been having some serious problems over the past several months. In the past it was fairly manageable, but recently things have been getting worse.
I have a 12-inch PowerBook G4, I bought it at the McGill bookstore in October 2004. The first problem was the apparently random crashes that Mac OS X (v.10.4.8) would experience from time to time. It was fairly infrequent at first so it didn't bother me too much (and I thought it was just some sort of glitch). But it persisted and came to be expected.
What would happen is that my screen would darken and center box would appear telling me, "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." (it would display this message in English, French, German, and Japanese for my convenience). After I restart the computer I get the message, "The computer was restarted after Mac OS X quit unexpectedly". At first it seemed to be linked to time; after a while it would just crash, sometimes after an hour or so, sometimes after as little as five minutes. (I fear as I write this that I will have to start over). More recently I've come to associate the crashes with movement of the computer; perhaps the battery (which is pretty much dead after so much use) is affecting the performance, I don't know.
The next problem, which coincided with the crashes, was my clock being reset. I assumed this was directly associated with the spontaneous shutdown of the computer, yet though the crashes continued, the clock was not always reset (just about a third of the time). This was a pretty frustrating inconvenience given the frequency of the crashes at the beginning.
The major problem that prompted me to take action was the lose of sound. One day, about a month ago now, my sound suddenly stopped working. At first I thought it was a hardware problem, but then I noticed the sound was still working with some things and just not others. For example, the sound increase/decrease indicator (the 'pop' sound when turning up or down the sound) stopped working, yet the startup sound still worked. I've found that Realplayer, MPlayer X 2, and Windows Media Player work fine but iTunes, VLC, and Quicktime don't. Most of the applications simply don't make sound but when I try to video in VLC I get the following error: "auhal: we cannot find our HAL component" or "auhal: audio-device var does not exist. device probe failed."
Other minor errors I have come across include inability to detect the Airport card (remedied upon restarting the computer) and occasional seizing up of the keyboard (the letter keys, exclusively, were unresponsive for sometime before working again suddenly without need of restart).
I've run diagnostic tools such as Disk Utility and the 'fsck' command in single-user mode, but nothing has been detected. It consistently comes up saying that everything is alright.
I have backed-up all important files and programs (with the exception of my Firefox bookmarks, do you know how I can save those?) and am prepared to do whatever it takes to bring my computer back to working order. I need my computer for schoolwork and assignments so if I can fix it myself in anyway... I would prefer to avoid lengthly repairs if possible.
Please let me know what my options are, and/or possible things I can do to repair these problems. This whole affair is, unsurprisingly, driving me crazy.
One last thing, upon launching Microsoft Word, I get the following pop-up:
Application Launch Failure
The application "Word" could not be launched because of a shared library error: "3<Microsoft Word><Microsoft Word><MicrosoftLSLibZ>"
I do not know whether this is linked to my other problems or not. This too, is something that has recently come up and is significantly affecting my work (I have had to switch to writing my essays on TextEdit).
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Eric Oosenbrug
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

try shutting down, remove the battery, carefully pull out AirPort card and reinstall it.
maybe run hardware test included with CD kit

Sporadic Sound Loss in 3.0

This is something minor but I thought it was at least worth noting. I think it seems to happen when you copy and paste text, but the sound will all the sudden stop working. Last night I did a hard reset on my phone and that worked fine. Today it happened again and my texts were no longer making any sound alerts, then randomly about 10 minutes later, sound is working again? It's kind of odd to me. I understand this is the beta and part of the reason why people like myself are testing, but I thought I'd post it up and see if it was isolated to my phone or others might be having a similar issue. If so, maybe the moderators/devs might see this here and rectify. Thanks all, aside from that the new update is awesome. Couple lag issues but fairly stable for a beta.
Mike

This thought is assuming that you have your settings set to the following:
From the RT menu:
Unlimited RT
Playback Frame Rate & Quality set to Dynamic
Multiclip playback is checked
From the View Menu:
Show Multiclip Angles is checked.
Viewer or Canvas:
Playhead Sync set to Open
When you start playing your timeline, the canvas will display the current active angle, while the viewer will show the multi-up display. By default, this loads only the video into the viewer. You can confirm this by looking at the tabs at the top of the viewer, you should only see 3: Video, Filters, and Motion. So if you click on the viewer to make it active, there will be no audio.
If you really need to hear audio in the viewer, then double click the multiclip to load it into the viewer, but doing this will set playhead sync to Off.

G4 Cube total sound loss

Hi Folks,
I was sat quite happily working away, listening to BBC Radio 2's great Steve Wright in the Afternoon over the Internet via a Widget on my Cube, when all of a sudden, the sound just stopped, along with a 'disconnection'-type noise.
Having had the situation many a time that the Internet connection had been lost, I went to the Widget to reconnect to the signal, only to see that the signal was still streaming into the Widget. At the time, I was clearing out some duplicates in iTunes (a job that seemingly is endless), and I then further noticed that System sounds were not coming through to the speakers either.
Finally, I checked by playing from iTunes itself, and there's very definitely no sound coming from my Mac.
The speakers are Harmann Kardon Soundsticks II, which are connected to a Griffin switch that takes the line input to the speakers and converts this to USB so that I can plug them into the Cube. They've got power, and have worked happily for around eighteen months. If I unplug the line cable from the Griffin switch, I get a sound from the speakers, so they're definitely okay.
So far, I've repaired permissions, verified my hard drive, rebooted, logged out & in, checked System Preferences & Apple System Profiler, but still no sound emanates from my Mac.
Can anyone help, please?

Hi,
Thanks for the response and for the article link.
I can't mark this as answered or resolved, but the Soundsticks are pumping sound out as I type. I'm just not sure I could repeat the process, nor understand which bit did what exactly. Talk about some odd behaviours...
Your suggestion is sound: isolate the Griffin iMic. I plugged in my earbuds - no sound.
Then, I thought, get out the old Cube speakers: I unplugged the iMic & plugged in the old faithfuls. On my desktop came an OS warning script, of the type seen in OS installations (black square with white text in four languages, explaining the only thing this here CPU can do is switch off, thank you very much).
After the restart, Cube speakers working: so the sound card etc are all good. Next, I hot swapped the Cube speakers for the Soundsticks - no output, no connection noises, no power hum.
So I plugged the Soundsticks into my iPod via line - no sound. Then I plugged the Soundsticks into my PowerBook via line - no sound. So I tried the iMic with the PowerBook & the Soundsticks - no sound.
Even though the Soundsticks power light was on, I checked its transformer for warmth, checked all connections, unplugged power & plugged back in (a la 'Have you tried turning it off and on again?'). I hot swapped the iMic one more time into the Cube, and noticed again no connection noises or power hum, but after unplugging and plugging the line input to the iMic a couple of times, noticed the return of the power whine & connection noise. As I hovered around the Cube USB port, I got similar connection noises...
Unfortunately, the hot swap again caused a problem, and the Cube shut down. After reboot, I went through your instructions again for the cuda reset, as I'm sure this Mac is showing the right kinds of distress that reset solves. I haven't done it yet though - can't bring myself to crack the case straight away now that the Soundsticks are working again.

Sudden dramatic loss of TM remaining storage i.e. sudden increase in backup

Over the months, the amount remaining on my 1 Terabyte HD has been gradually decreasing, as Time Machine does backups. Today, I noticed a sudden, dramatic decrease in the amount of remaining storage. It dropped from around 400Gig to 360 Gig. That's a drop of 40Gig in a week. I have not been doing anything out of the ordinary, so that is weird. Other than that, everything seems to be working normally. Any ideas?

4miler,
Consider the following regarding you loss of disk space:
*_Incremental Backups Seem Too Large!_*
Open the Time Machine Prefs on the Mac in question. How much space does it report you have "Available"? When a backup is initiated how much space does it report you need?
Now, consider the following, it might give you some ideas:
Time Machine performs backups at the file level. If a single bit in a large file is changed, the WHOLE file is backed up again. This is a problem for programs that save data to monolithic virtual disk files that are modified frequently. These include Parallels, VMware Fusion, Aperture vaults, or the databases that Entourage and Thunderbird create. These should be excluded from backup using the Time Machine Preference Exclusion list. You will, however, need to backup these files manually to another external disk.
One poster observed regarding Photoshop: “If you find yourself working with large files, you may discover that TM is suddenly backing up your scratch disk's temp files. This is useless, find out how to exclude these (I'm not actually sure here). Alternatively, turn off TM whilst you work in Photoshop.” [http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1209412]
If you do a lot of movie editing, unless these files are excluded, expect Time Machine to treat revised versions of a single movie as entirely new files.
If you frequently download software or video files that you only expect to keep for a short time, consider excluding the folder these are stored in from Time Machine backups.
If you have recently created a new disk image or burned a DVD, Time Machine will target these files for backup unless they are deleted or excluded from backup.
*Events-Based Backups*
Time Machine does not compare file for file to see if changes have been made. If it had to rescan every file on your drive before each backup, it would not be able to perform backups as often as it does. Rather, it looks for EVENTS (fseventsd) that take place involving your files and folders. Moving/copying/deleting/saving files and folders creates events that Time Machine looks for. [http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14]
Installing new software, upgrading existing software, or updating Mac OS X system software can create major changes in the structure of your directories. Every one of these changes is recorded by the OS as an event. Time Machine will backup every file that has an event associated with it since the installation.
Files or folders that are simply moved or renamed are counted as NEW files or folders. If you rename any file or folder, Time Machine will back up the ENTIRE file or folder again no matter how big or small it is.
George Schreyer describes this behavior: “If you should want to do some massive rearrangement of your disk, Time Machine will interpret the rearranged files as new files and back them up again in their new locations. Just renaming a folder will cause this to happen. This is OK if you've got lots of room on your backup disk. Eventually, Time Machine will thin those backups and the space consumed will be recovered. However, if you really want recover the space in the backup volume immediately, you can. To do this, bring a Finder window to the front and then click the Time Machine icon on the dock. This will activate the Time Machine user interface. Navigate back in time to where the old stuff exists and select it. Then pull down the "action" menu (the gear thing) and select "delete all backups" and the older stuff vanishes.” (http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html)
*TechTool Pro Directory Protection*
This disk utility feature creates backup copies of your system directories. Obviously these directories are changing all the time. So, depending on how it is configured, these backup files will be changing as well which is interpreted by Time Machine as new data to backup. Excluding the folder these backups are stored in will eliminate this effect.
*Backups WAY Too Large*
If an initial full backup or subsequent incremental backup is tens or hundreds of Gigs larger than expected, check to see that all unwanted external hard disks are still excluded from Time Machine backups.
This includes the Time Machine backup drive ITSELF. Normally, Time Machine is set to exclude itself by default. But on rare occasions it can forget. When your backup begins, Time Machine mounts the backup on your desktop. (For Time Capsule users it appears as a white drive icon labeled something like “Backup of (your computer)”.) If, while it is mounted, it does not show up in the Time Machine Prefs “Do not back up” list, then Time Machine will attempt to back ITSELF up. If it is not listed while the drive is mounted, then you need to add it to the list.
*Recovering Backup Space*
If you have discovered that large unwanted files have been backed up, you can use the Time Machine “time travel” interface to recovered some of that space.
Launch Time Machine from the Dock icon.
Initially, you are presented with a window that represents “Today (Now)”. DO NOT make changes to file while you see “Today (Now)” at the bottom of the screen.
Click on the window just behind “Today (Now)”. This represents the last successful backup and should display the date and time of this backup at the bottom of the screen.
Now, navigate to where the unwanted file resides.
Highlight the file and click the Actions menu (Gear icon) from the toolbar.
Select “Delete all backups of <this file>”.
*FileVault / Boot Camp / iDisk Syncing*
Note: Leopard has changed the way it deals with FileVault disk images, so it is not necessary to exclude your Home folder if you have FileVault activated. Additionally, Time Machine ignores Boot Camp partitions as the manner in which they are formatted is incompatible. Finally, if you have your iDisk Synced to your desktop, it is not necessary to exclude the disk image file it creates as that has been changed to a sparsebundle as well in Leopard.
Let us know if this was helpful.
Cheers!

Sound loss, crashes and other problems

Hello,
I have been having some serious problems over the past several months.
In the past it was fairly manageable, but recently things have been getting worse.
I have a 12-inch PowerBook G4, I bought it at the McGill bookstore in October 2004. The first problem was the apparently random crashes that Mac OS X (v.10.4.8) would experience from time to time. It was fairly infrequent at first so it didn't bother me too much (and I thought it was just some sort of glitch). But it persisted and came to be expected.
What would happen is that my screen would darken and center box would appear telling me, "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." (it would display this message in English, French, German, and Japanese for my convenience). After I restart the computer I get the message, "The computer was restarted after Mac OS X quit unexpectedly". At first it seemed to be linked to time; after a while it would just crash, sometimes after an hour or so, sometimes after as little as five minutes. (I fear as I write this that I will have to start over). More recently I've come to associate the crashes with movement of the computer; perhaps the battery (which is pretty much dead after so much use) is affecting the performance, I don't know.
The next problem, which coincided with the crashes, was my clock being reset. I assumed this was directly associated with the spontaneous shutdown of the computer, yet though the crashes continued, the clock was not always reset (just about a third of the time). This was a pretty frustrating inconvenience given the frequency of the crashes at the beginning.
The major problem that prompted me to take action was the lose of sound. One day, about a month ago now, my sound suddenly stopped working. At first I thought it was a hardware problem, but then I noticed the sound was still working with some things and just not others. For example, the sound increase/decrease indicator (the 'pop' sound when turning up or down the sound) stopped working, yet the startup sound still worked. I've found that Realplayer, MPlayer X 2, and Windows Media Player work fine but iTunes, VLC, and Quicktime don't. Most of the applications simply don't make sound but when I try to video in VLC I get the following error: "auhal: we cannot find our HAL component" or "auhal: audio-device var does not exist. device probe failed."
Other minor errors I have come across include inability to detect the Airport card (remedied upon restarting the computer) and occasional seizing up of the keyboard (the letter keys, exclusively, were unresponsive for sometime before working again suddenly without need of restart).
I've run diagnostic tools such as Disk Utility and the 'fsck' command in single-user mode, but nothing has been detected. It consistently comes up saying that everything is alright.
I have backed-up all important files and programs (with the exception of my Firefox bookmarks, do you know how I can save those?) and am prepared to do whatever it takes to bring my computer back to working order. I need my computer for schoolwork and assignments so if I can fix it myself in anyway... I would prefer to avoid lengthly repairs if possible.
Please let me know what my options are, and/or possible things I can do to repair these problems. This whole affair is, unsurprisingly, driving me crazy.
One last thing, upon launching Microsoft Word, I get the following pop-up:
Application Launch Failure
The application "Word" could not be launched because of a shared library error: "3<Microsoft Word><Microsoft Word><MicrosoftLSLibZ>"
I do not know whether this is linked to my other problems or not. This too, is something that has recently come up and is significantly affecting my work (I have had to switch to writing my essays on TextEdit).
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Eric Oosenbrug

Hi, Eric.
1. You wrote: "...my screen would darken and center box would appear telling me, "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.""You are describing the following message:
That indicates a kernel panic. Failure to address these when they first arise can result in bad problems becoming worse.
See my "Resolving Kernel Panics" FAQ. This FAQ includes step-by-step instructions for identifying and resolving some of the most common causes of kernel panics. The FAQ is a roadmap: start at the beginning and work systematically through the end, i.e. the "If all else fails..." section.
2. You wrote: "…upon launching Microsoft Word, I get the following pop-up:
Application Launch Failure
The application "Word" could not be launched because of a shared library error: "3<Microsoft Word><Microsoft Word><MicrosoftLSLibZ>"
I do not know whether this is linked to my other problems or not."It's probably related. Failure to address the kernel panics when they first arose may have resulted in a corrupted OS. I discuss shared library errors in my "Troubleshooting shared library errors" FAQ.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Sudden sound loss

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