Re: Problem getting sound through headphones running 2.2.2 on macOS High Sierra

I suspect that the reason you see this problem now and not before, is due
to a combination of things.

You probably connected things up before you started Audacity 99% of the
time, so never noticed the issue.

Also, as has been mentioned on the other mailing list, for some devices,
the Mac sound system will seamlessly switch from one device to another
without any user input - Mac's fabled "it just works" ;-)
This is usually the case when plugging in conventional (mini-jack)
headphones into a Mac that has built-in speakers.

On the other hand, some devices (notably USB devices) appear in the Mac
sound system as a new, additional device, and for Audacity to see it,
Audacity must be told to rescan audio devices, or restarted.

There may have been some change, either in the updated macOS, or a
difference in hardware, or some other change that alerted you to the issue,
and then, having seen the issue, you were then looking for it, which makes
the issue abundantly obvious.

Audacity has always worked the same in this respect, and there are many
places in the manual that say "plug in your devices first" (but it's a big
manual, and we can't make every possible issue a headline).

Ideally we would like Audacity to be able to automatically rescan when
necessary, but that has proved to be technically problematic. I've not
personally investigated this deeply, but I think the main problem is that
there have not been mechanisms available to reliably inform Audacity when
devices have changed. As far as I'm aware "hot plug" support in PortAudio
(the cross-platform audio I/O library that Audacity uses) is still
considered to be "work in progress".

Steve

On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 01:27, Mark Miller <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> Thanks for this information. I've been using Audacity for years. I was
> wondering if maybe I've been plugging in the headphones before starting
> Audacity all this time, and the only time I noticed this issue was the one
> time when I didn't do that.
>
> It sounds like what I've been experiencing is the result of a deliberate
> design decision. Now I'm wondering if there's some way to alert users to
> this... I've tried what you said, and it works. The thing is, it would not
> have occurred to me to do what you say in a hundred years, except that you
> pointed it out. Perhaps some note about this should be made in the
> documentation, maybe an entry for "Headphones, and other audio devices"? I
> don't see anything obvious in the documentation talking about how Audacity
> handles adding and removing audio devices. I noticed an entry under "Menu
> Bar" for the Transport menu, which briefly describes the Rescan Audio
> Devices option, but I doubt that would have prompted me to try it for my
> particular problem.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> ---Mark
> [email protected]
>
> ------------------------------
> Bob Cavenaugh is basically right. By default, Audacity checks the system
> to see what audio devices are available. If you add another device after
> Audacity has started, Audacity will not know that it is there unless you
> either restart Audacity, or tell Audacity to rescan for audio devices.
>
> To tell Audacity to rescan for audio devices, open the "Transport" menu,
> then click on "Rescan Audio Devices".
> Note that the audio devices become unavailable briefly while the system is
> being scanned. When the scan has completed, Audacity will have an updated
> list of what audio devices are available on your system.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

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