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I have a couple of older (High-Sierra) Apple products that I use for some non-essential tasks, for some reason after some kind of update the audio stopped working on both of them. After pulling my hair out for the past week trying to solve the issue I finally figured it out and wanted to post here with the solution in case anyone else runs into the same problem:

The Problem

  • Computer updates and restarts (not sure what exactly is being updated...)

  • After restart no sound devices are working and the Sound section of System Preferences is inaccessible.

Everything I Tried (That Failed)

  • Restarting/Shut-Down

  • Disk First-Aid

  • Booted to Safe Mode

  • PRAM and SMC reset

  • Terminal commands to restart coreaudiod

  • Reinstall of OS (Command-R on boot)

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The ACTUAL Solution

  • coreaudiod (the core audio component on these older Macs) is failing, constantly restarting preventing it from running correctly. The culprit (for reasons that elude me) is Background Music, an app that I had never used or even heard of before but may have been there the entire time. For whatever reason it is causing coreaudiod to fail and for no sound devices to work correctly.

  • Removing all traces of Background Music FINALLY solved all of my problems, the link I used is below but I will post the full text in a comment as well just in case.

https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic/blob/master/MANUAL-UNINSTALL.md

Here is what to do (taken from the GitHub link posted above):

Manual Uninstall

  • Delete Background Music.app from /Applications.

  • Delete Background Music Device.driver from /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL.

  • Pause apps that are playing audio, if you can.

  • Restart coreaudiod:
    (Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and paste the following at the prompt.)

    sudo killall coreaudiod

    or, if that fails

    sudo launchctl kickstart -kp system/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod

  • Go to the Sound section in System Settings and change your default output device at least once. (If you only have one device now, either use Audio MIDI Setup.app to create a temporary aggregate device, restart any audio apps that have stopped working or just restart your system.)

Troubleshooting

If you still have the Background Music audio device, try using Terminal.app to make sure you've deleted its files:

sudo ls /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL

If you see Background Music Device.driver in the output of that command, use this command to actually delete it:

sudo rm -rf "/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/Background Music Device.driver"

Then restart coreaudiod again. If that still doesn't work, restart your computer. If that doesn't work, feel free to open an issue. Include the output of sudo ls /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL.

Optional

  • Delete BGMXPCHelper.xpc from /usr/local/libexec or possibly /Library/Application Support/Background Music.

  • Unregister BGMXPCHelper.

    • If you're using OS X 10.11 or later:

      sudo launchctl bootout system /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.bearisdriving.BGM.XPCHelper.plist

    • If you're using an earlier version of OS X:

      sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.bearisdriving.BGM.XPCHelper.plist

  • Delete BGMXPCHelper's launchd.plist.

    sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.bearisdriving.BGM.XPCHelper.plist

  • Delete BGMXPCHelper's user and group.

    sudo dscl . -delete /Users/_BGMXPCHelper
sudo dscl . -delete /Groups/_BGMXPCHelper

Thank you so much to kyleneideck for this solution.

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