Reset Audio

Restart macOS Core Audio in one keystroke, and hear whether it worked.

When audio on a Mac wedges — no sound at all, a device that has vanished from the list, an interface your DAW can see but not open, crackling that survives a buffer change — the fix is almost always to restart the Core Audio daemon:

sudo killall -9 coreaudiod

That command has never been the hard part. The friction is everything around it. Find the note you keep it in, select the line, copy it, launch Terminal, paste, type an admin password into a shell prompt that gives no useful screen reader feedback, then read back the scrollback to work out whether anything actually happened. Six steps and a context switch to run one command that takes half a second.

This is that, as one command and one app. It gets root the accessible way, confirms Core Audio genuinely came back rather than assuming it, and says the result out loud.

Built by and for a screen reader user, which is why the confirmation is spoken rather than printed. It works exactly the same with VoiceOver off, and if you are sighted you may just like not opening Terminal.

Requirements

macOS, and nothing else.

No Python, no Homebrew, no Command Line Tools, nothing to install first. It is /bin/bash and the tools every Mac already has, which is deliberate: the thing you reach for when audio is broken should not itself have anything left to install.

VoiceOver is optional. With it running, announcements go through VoiceOver itself; without it, they go through say.

Install

git clone https://github.com/Matthew2244/reset-audio.git
cd reset-audio
./install.sh

That symlinks the reset-audio command into ~/bin and builds ~/Applications/Reset Audio.app, then verifies both. It never asks for your password.

If ~/bin is not on your PATH, the installer says so and prints the line to add. To put things elsewhere:

./install.sh --prefix /usr/local --app-dir /Applications
./install.sh --no-app          # command line only

./uninstall.sh removes both, taking the same options.

Use

Reset Core Audio:

reset-audio

Or launch Reset Audio from Spotlight, the Dock, or a keyboard shortcut — it has no window and no Dock icon, it just runs and speaks.

You will hear one of:

• "Core Audio reset. Done. REAPER is open, so check its audio device."
• "Core Audio reset cancelled. Nothing was changed." — you dismissed the password dialog.
• "Core Audio was stopped but has not come back yet. Give it a moment, then run reset audio again."

The named-application part is there because several DAWs hold their device open across a restart and need reselecting afterwards. It recognises the usual suspects and only mentions the ones actually running.

Other things it does

• --status — whether Core Audio is running, how long for, how much CPU it is using, whether the next reset will prompt you, and which audio apps are open. Changes nothing.
• --dry-run — says what a reset would do. Changes nothing.
• --quiet — print, do not speak.
• --say — speak with say even when VoiceOver is running.
• --dialog — always use the password dialog, even when passwordless sudo is available.
• --timeout SECONDS — how long to wait for Core Audio to come back. Default 15.
• --install-help — how to make resets promptless.

Exit codes: 0 succeeded, 1 cancelled or failed, 2 Core Audio was stopped but had not returned within the timeout.

How it gets root

Stopping a system daemon needs root, and how you are asked for it is the whole accessibility story here. In order of preference:

1. Passwordless sudo, if you have chosen to install the one-line rule. You type nothing at all. It is opt-in and the installer does not do it for you — see below.

2. The native macOS authorisation dialog, via AppleScript's with administrator privileges. One dialog, a real secure text field, proper VoiceOver support, and Touch ID where your keyboard offers it. No Terminal window, no shell prompt, no echoed password.

What it never does is prompt in a terminal. sudo's own prompt is a bare line of text with no accessible label, no announcement when it appears, and no feedback as you type — it is the single worst part of the manual routine, and avoiding it is most of the point of this tool.

Either way the result is checked rather than assumed. It waits for launchd to respawn coreaudiod and confirms the new process has a different PID, so a daemon that refused to die is reported as a failure instead of being announced as a success.

Making it promptless

reset-audio --install-help prints a sudoers rule scoped to exactly this one command:

you ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/killall -9 coreaudiod

Because sudoers matches the whole command line, this grants that exact argument vector and nothing else — killall -9 on anything else still asks for a password. The worst case if it were ever abused is a stopped audio daemon that launchd restarts a second later.

It is still a change to your machine's security configuration, so it is your decision and this project will not make it for you. Running with the dialog is a perfectly good way to use this.

What it does not do

• It does not restart audio devices, only the Core Audio daemon. If your interface itself has locked up, this will not unlock it.
• It does not change your default input or output device.
• It does not touch the network. Nothing is uploaded, logged remotely, or phoned home.
• It does not run in the background, install a launch agent, or start at login. It runs when you run it, and exits.

Contributing

Yes, please — including if you are writing the change with an AI assistant. CONTRIBUTING.md is written to be complete enough to work from on its own, and ./tools/check.sh runs everything CI does in about a second.

The most useful small contributions are probably: applications missing from the "check its audio device" list, and reports of the spoken output being wrong, clumsy, or talked over on a screen reader other than VoiceOver.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.