How to Restart the macOS CoreAudio Daemon to Fix Sound Issues

The CoreAudio Daemon

In macOS, all sound processing—from the system “ping” notifications to complex multi-track recording in Logic Pro—is handled by a central background service called the CoreAudio daemon (coreaudiod). If a user unplugs a USB audio interface abruptly, or if a poorly coded third-party video conferencing app crashes, it can take the CoreAudio daemon down with it.

Symptoms of a crashed coreaudiod process include:

• The volume icon in the menu bar turning grey and becoming unclickable.
• No sound playing from the internal speakers or headphones.
• System Settings > Sound freezing completely when attempting to change inputs.

While the standard fix is to reboot the entire Mac, this is highly disruptive. You can fix the issue in three seconds by forcefully restarting the daemon via the Terminal.

Step 1: Locating the Process

Before you restart it, you can verify that the process is actually running (or hung) by using the ps (process status) command combined with grep.

1. Open the Terminal application.
2. Run the following command:

ps aux | grep coreaudiod

You should see a line of text indicating that /usr/sbin/coreaudiod is running, along with its associated Process ID (PID).

Step 2: Restarting CoreAudio

macOS uses the launchd system to manage all background services. If you kill a critical daemon, launchd is programmed to instantly respawn a fresh, clean instance of it.

To forcefully terminate the hung audio engine, use the killall command. Because this is a system-level process, you must execute the command with administrator privileges using sudo.

sudo killall coreaudiod

Press Enter, type your Mac’s administrator password (the characters will not appear on screen as you type), and press Enter again.

What Happens Next?

The command executes silently. If you were playing music, it will instantly stop. The volume icon in your menu bar might briefly vanish or flicker.

Within a fraction of a second, the macOS kernel will detect that the audio engine has died and will automatically restart it. The volume icon will return to normal, and the internal speakers will become active again.

If you have any professional audio applications open (like Ableton Live or Final Cut Pro), you may need to restart those specific applications so they can re-establish their connection to the newly refreshed CoreAudio engine.