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Fixing Self-Muting Sound

Scott L. Barber

Scott L. Barber first posted this to Quadlist. It is reprinted with his permission.

Go into your Preferences folder and remove the Display Preferences and Sound Preferences. One of the problems when Mac system software switched over was that the engineering team at Apple created Monitors & Sound, instead of leaving them separate. This created two separate versions of preferences files which badly screws up the system software.

The Monitors control panel writes to a file named Display Preferences. The Sound control panel writes to a file named Sound Preferences Monitors & Sound writes to a folder in the Preferences folder named Monitor & Sound Preferences

The problem is, if Display Preferences or Sound Preferences exists in the System folder, that means at one time the control panel Monitors, or the control panel Sound, existed on the machine and was opened once. The OS looks for the first two files by default - if they exist they win, and there's nothing you can do about it except throw the files away.

Now the way Monitors & Sound works is, there is a required extension named System AV that calls the other preferences files - but if there is a Display or Sound Preference, System AV doesn't have the authority to override those settings until the Monitors & Sound control panel is opened.

Apple left this so that educational labs could default their machines by leaving a set Display and Sound preferences files in the preference folder for symmetry. This guaranteed that no student could screw up the settings, or prank set them at high or weird resolutions/sounds, and upon reboot they would be fixed. They didn't document the feature for anyone but university resellers, who were notified with their educational packs. If it hadn't been for my extremely stupid reseller, I wouldn't have had either access or experience with the labs - I worked as an assistant to him through college - he's a wonderful manager though. . . .*grin*

Scott L. Barber <serker@earthling.net>

Pres/CEO, SERKER Worldwide, Inc.

Providing Hardware/Networking/Telecomm for 13 years

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