IPad – Does Sidecar support sound

ipadmacossidecar

Apple Sidecar for Mac is a great way to use the iPad as a secondary screen.

However it appears that there is no support for sound. Is this correct, or am I doing something wrong?

I am on MacOS Catalina and iPadOS 14.1

Best Answer

Sidecar extends your display and audio is not a component of a display.

Use your iPad as a second display for your Mac with Sidecar

This is just another way to extend your desktop with another monitor. When you do that, you don't extend your audio as well. Audio is a different entity all together. In the support document linked above, there's no mention, whatsoever of audio.

It's probably confusing that when you connect a monitor with built in speakers via an HDMI cable that the display supports audio. That's not entirely accurate - as stated before, display and audio to macOS are two distinct entities. It will see the speakers of the display as an audio device and you have the option to send audio there or to the internal speakers or to any other connected audio device. So, while it's built in, they're not tied together.

Sidecar doesn't make the speakers of the iPad appear as audio devices to your Mac.

Related Solutions

MacOS – zsh array from variable does not work

I suppose if you wanted to do this in zsh, you would do the following.

~ arr=(foo bar)
~ echo $arr[1]
foo
~ val='foo bar'
~ eval "arr=($val)"
~ echo $arr[1]
foo

When you entered arr=($val), zsh interpreted this to mean arr=("foo bar") even though you did not explicitly put a pair of " around $val. When I entered eval "arr=($val)", zsh interpreted this to mean arr=(foo bar). Using eval can be confusing. When in doubt, you can use the following experiment.

Say you want to know what eval sees and therefore what really will be executed. Start with the statement shown below. Here, I assume you have already entered val='foo bar'.

eval "arr=($val)"

Now replace eval with echo as shown below.

echo "arr=($val)"

Entering the above command produces the following result.

arr=(foo bar)

This what zsh will actually be executing.

IPad – Does iOS 13 (aka, iPadOS) provide better support for connecting a webcam to an iPad

There has been no mention of enabling video or audio streaming over the usb-c connector. The two features they are adding is to allow your iPad as a monitor for your mac, and now you can use a thumb drive or external drive via a usb-c and access the files via the file browser on iPadOS.

"Connect an external hard drive, SD card reader, and, yes, even a USB drive." https://www.apple.com/ipados/ipados-preview/

You might be able to wire something up via homeKit. But you'd need to be doing wireless, and there may even be wireless solutions to this day. But they are no adding anything new for native wired audio/video over usb-c.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – zsh array from variable does not work

IPad – Does iOS 13 (aka, iPadOS) provide better support for connecting a webcam to an iPad

Related Question