I had a really strange audio problem with my MBP yesterday.
To start with, here was what more or less happened:
- I was about to put the laptop into sleep (standby) mode.
- The speakers were plugged in via line-out.
- I was lowering the volume with the keyboard controls.
- I unplugged the audio cable.
- And put the laptop into sleep mode.
When I turned the laptop back on, I hit Cmd+F1 to get Synergy to start playing music again and Growl dutifully showed the cover art for the current playing track… unfortunately, nothing else happened - aka no bloody sound from the internal speakers. I tried to change the volume with the keyboard controls and the volume control overlay (image below). Instead of changing the volume, the overlay displayed the No symbol centred at the bottom of the with the volume set to 0 (i.e. no bars filled in).
More out of curiosity than anything else, I plugged in the audio cable from the speakers and lo and behold the speakers worked as expected - with sound…
After digging through the OSX System Preferences, I found a horrible looking error message for the internal speakers stating: “The selected device has no output controls”. I pushed through quite a lot of Google results and eventually stumbled onto this forum posting via another forum posting. For all intents and purposes, it’s a hardware problem on Macbooks. Macbooks and MBP’s have three audio outputs: 1 - internal speakers; 2 - line out; 3 - optical out. Both the line out and the optical out are driven by the same output port. In some strange circumstances, the sensor inside the port which determines if there is a jack plugged in or not becomes slightly confused and thinks that an optical jack is plugged in when there isn’t anything plugged in.
Thankfully, this somewhat irritating hardware problem can be fixed without having to go in for repairs.
With a toothpick…
That’s correct - to fix a really beautiful piece of modern electronics, you need a small piece of wood (or plastic in my own case). The irony wasn’t lost.
Tags:audio osx problem
Hi,
What did you do with the toothpick? Is there something you have to bent?
Ass you will guess I have the same problem with the audio output!
Thnxs
Marco
Hi Marco,
As near as I can recall, there is a sensor inside the audio out port on the MBP. All that I did was put the toothpick from my Swiss army knife into the audio port and wiggled it around for a few seconds. The sensor inside the port is there to try and work out whether the jack that’s put into the port is normal line out or optical out. In my case, it assumed that there was an optical out jack plugged in and it didn’t believe my protests until I broke out the bloody toothpick…
Good luck
Hi Andrew,
I think it did the trick. I just wiggled the toothpick inside and after a few seconds it stopped shining red.
Thanks
Marco
thanks!! amazing! it worked simple as that!!
Where exactly do I stick the toothpick. I’m having the same problem. VERY frustrating. Help! -Rachel
Hi Rachel,
Take a tooth pick and gently push it into the audio out port on the left hand side of your MBP and just wiggle it around a little bit.
HTH.
I wiggled that pick for for like 5 mins… NOTHING. I want to die. Fuck
Awesome thanks, this was really bugging me. They really should put a software reset somewhere in the OS.
Thank you so much!!! I stumbled on this blog after searching for a way to solve this problem - I didn’t have a toothpick handy, but the end of a lollipop stick worked beautifully.
You made my day.
Done …. with a cotton-bud ! Thanks for the trick
Drew