MacOS – Audio device list screwed up in El Capitan, audio interface not appearing in list

audiomacos

I'm using the following audio interfaces:

  • Internal audio
  • Thunderbolt Display audio
  • RME Fireface UC (USB audio interface)
  • Alesis ControlHub (USB audio interface)
  • Orion32 (USB audio interface, used occasionally at a friend's studio)

Everything was working fine on Yosemite. I upgraded to 10.11.2 a couple of weeks ago and since then, I've been experiencing the following:

  • When connected to the Thunderbolt display, it doesn't appear in the audio device list. Instead, the Orion32 device appears. I checked to see whether there's just a title mixup with the display audio, but nothing comes out of the speakers when selected so that's probably not the case
  • The Alesis interface does not appear in the list and is unusable. According to this KB article, it should work out of the box. I also tried disabling SIP as detailed in this article (which deals, though, with another audio interface). I opened an issue at the Alesis support forum but don't have my hopes up for a reply from them, seeing other people complain about USB devices and getting no feedback.

I'm assuming that the two issues are related. I haven't tried connecting the real Orion32 device, as it's not in my studio, but the RME device works fine.

I would appreciate any input on how to investigate further.

Best Answer

So, for the sake of documenting this: I suspected that the Orion32 driver might be causing the trouble. Looking at system.log, every time I connected the Control Hub, the Orion driver logged some error messages. I deleted the driver and restarted the machine, which seems to have solved the problem.