MacOS – Mute Mac Sound When Idle

audiomacospreferences

I like it when my Mac announces the time every hour. It keeps me focused or provides me with a reminder to take a break. I also like it when Mail makes a sound when new messages arrive so I can check them. I like all these sounds when I'm using my computer.

What I don't like is these sounds when I'm not using my computer mainly because my Mac is in my bedroom. Usually the solution is simply to mute the Mac before bed but I sometimes forget and am woken up by an announcement telling me the time or letting me know new mail is in during the middle of the night.

Without putting my computer to sleep (I want it awake at all times when plugged in so it can do things I need it to do), is there any way my Mac can mute its sound when it is idle (or more preferably idle for some period of time)?

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I wanted the same and didn't find anything nice, so I coded an app for myself. You can find the code here and already as compiled app here.

Let me know what you think.

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macOS Audio – Can’t Unmute Sound When Mini-Jack Unplugged

If you are seeing the greyed out output volume when no headphones or plug is physically present than the physical switch to detect a plug missed the unplug event.

The system things you still have speakers connected and is routing the information to the jack.

Check for lint with a magnifying glass or very gently blow some clean compressed air. Service might be an option if this is something that happens very often.

Responding to the comments about this happening each time at reboot, that would indicate that the hardware is somehow saving headphones on as a default setting or the hardware is mis reading things at boot. Resetting NVRAM might help if it's a saved setting issue.

There are only 3 things in play here:

The physical package in the jack that is responsible for sensing if anything is inserted and telling if it's a metal jack or an optical jack.
The brains of the hardware - storing settings in NVRAM and turning the physical sensor into something the software can show you on the screen.
The OS - Lion or Snow Leopard

I would be very surprised it's Lion related - but I've seen strange things before where software doesn't make the correct read on a sensor. It's good you can restore things temporarily by plugging / unplugging a jack. If you took it to a repair shop, they would hopefully test your mac with Snow Leopard again to rule out lion before doing an actual repair on the jack or the hardware. If this is something you can depend on - it happens each and every time, you might test by booting from a backup or installing Snow Leopard onto a USB drive and testing. It sure sounds like an odd but reproducible thing you have happening to your mac.

MacBook – stop the optical audio out from entering ‘time out’ when idle

Playing a one-second silent sound every 50 seconds or so might help. Try this:

download 1 second silent .wav file here to desktop (or make your own)
in Terminal, change Directory to Desktop: cd ~/Desktop/
Try the following one-line command and see if your problem is alleviated:
```
while true; do afplay silence-1sec.wav ; sleep 50; done
```

The command above enters an infinite loop which plays the empty sound every 50 seconds. This should keep your output busy. You can exit the loop by pressing ⌘+.

NB: afplayis frequently overlooked for terminal sound playback, but is hugely useful.

If that works, one could convert the command to a command that invisibly runs in the background.

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Related Solutions

macOS Audio – Can’t Unmute Sound When Mini-Jack Unplugged

MacBook – stop the optical audio out from entering ‘time out’ when idle

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