Something is wrong
No sound on a Mac
A Mac has no volume mixer, no audio services to restart and no driver to roll back, so almost every list written for a PC is useless here. What it has instead is Core Audio, a second output setting nobody knows about, and a habit of handing your headphones to your phone. Start by making a sound somewhere: once anything has played, the hardware is out of the question and everything left is free.
The run, in order
Play a test tone in the browser
Ten seconds, and it halves the problem. A tone here means the output device, Core Audio and the speakers are all alive, and the silence belongs to one application — which on a Mac is a different conclusion than on a PC, because macOS has no per-application mixer to look in. Nothing here means the fault sits under every application, and the rest of this list is where it lives. Run it before touching a single setting: most of what follows is only worth doing if this step is silent, and the two steps that follow it are only worth doing if it is not.
Check which output macOS has chosen for itself
Click the Sound icon in the menu bar, or open Control Center and expand Sound, and you get the list of outputs macOS believes it has. Three of them take the sound away without telling you. A display on HDMI or USB-C registers an audio output whether or not the panel has a speaker, and macOS will select it when the display is plugged in or the Mac wakes. An AirPlay device — an Apple TV, a HomePod, a speaker in another room — stays in that list and stays selectable long after you stopped thinking about it. And a Bluetooth speaker that is powered off is still a paired, selected device as far as this menu is concerned. This is the single most common cause on a desktop Mac and it costs one click to rule out.
Look inside the silent app, because there is no mixer to look in
If the browser tone played and one app is silent, this is the step that fixes it. Windows would have a volume mixer with a row for that program; macOS has nothing of the kind, so every application that wants to choose its own output has to carry its own picker. Zoom, Teams, Discord, Slack, VLC, OBS and most games all do, and each remembers a device you selected on a different day — a headset, a capture card, a virtual device — and goes on using it. Open the app's own audio or sound settings and look at the output there, not at anything in macOS. Nothing in System Settings overrides it and nothing in the menu bar shows it.
Check the separate output for sound effects
System Settings, Sound. Below the output list is Play sound effects through, with a device picker of its own, and it does not have to agree with the main output. The symptom is specific and confusing: alerts, the Trash and the volume-change click all play while music and video are silent, or exactly the reverse. There is no equivalent setting in Windows at all, which is why no guide written for a PC will mention it and why people conclude the Mac is half-broken. Set it to follow the same device, and while you are on this screen check that the output volume slider is not at zero and Mute is not ticked — they are separate from the menu bar's and from the keyboard keys.
Find out whether your AirPods went to the iPhone
AirPods and Beats are allowed to move themselves between Apple devices, and they will do it mid-sentence: the phone rings, a video starts on the iPad, and the headphones switch without a sound on the Mac to say so. The Mac keeps playing into a pair of headphones that are no longer listening. Open the Bluetooth settings, the info button beside the AirPods, and set Connect to This Mac to When Last Connected to This Mac instead of Automatically — that stops the handover and leaves the switching to you. If the AirPods are in the list but selecting them does nothing, put them in the case, shut it, wait ten seconds and open it beside the Mac.
Look for a virtual audio device a meeting app left behind
Anything that records, streams or cleans up a call installs an audio device of its own — BlackHole, Loopback, Soundflower, Krisp, Rogue Amoeba's tools, the capture driver bundled with conferencing software — and any of them can end up as the default output. They are not broken; they are pipes, and a pipe with nothing on the far end is silence with every indicator looking healthy. In the output list they appear under names that do not sound like hardware. Select your real speakers instead, and if a device you no longer recognise keeps reselecting itself, uninstall whatever installed it with that app's own uninstaller rather than by dragging anything to the Trash.
Open Audio MIDI Setup and check for an aggregate device
Applications, Utilities, Audio MIDI Setup. This is the window that has no counterpart in Windows, and two things in it silence a Mac. An Aggregate Device or a Multi-Output Device, created once for a stream or a podcast, can still be the default output — and a Multi-Output Device cannot be volume-controlled at all, so the giveaway is a greyed-out volume slider and volume keys that do nothing while the Mac insists it is playing. The other is the sample rate: a device set to a rate the hardware behind it will not accept plays nothing. Select your actual output in the left column, set the format back to 44 100 Hz or 48 000 Hz, and delete any aggregate you are not using.
Restart Core Audio
Open Terminal and run sudo killall coreaudiod. This is the nearest thing macOS has to restarting the Windows audio services, and it is the step to reach for when the settings all look correct and nothing plays: one process owns every sound on the machine, and when it is wedged the interface carries on drawing volume sliders over nothing. It comes back by itself within a second or two, every application keeps running, and nothing is lost except whatever was mid-playback. If sound returns, nothing was ever broken — and if it happens repeatedly, the cause is usually one of the virtual devices two steps above.
On an older MacBook, look into the headphone socket for a red light
MacBook Pros up to around 2015, and the Mac mini and iMac of the same era, put an optical digital output inside the headphone jack. A dirty socket, or a plug pushed in at an angle, can leave the little switch inside stuck in the digital position — and in that state the Mac is happily sending an optical signal down a hole that has a pair of headphones in it. The tell is visible: turn the lights down and look into the port, and you will see a faint red glow. Insert and remove the plug slowly five or six times to work the switch back, and blow the socket out. Nothing here applies to a Mac made since about 2016, whose jack is analogue only.
Try the headphones or speakers on a phone
The step that ends the search and the only one that can point at a purchase. Ten seconds with a phone separates the equipment from the computer: silent there as well and the headphones or speakers are the fault, working there after everything above has failed and it is the socket or the audio hardware in the Mac. Before booking anything, try the built-in speakers and the headphone socket separately — they fail independently, and a laptop with dead speakers and a working jack is a repair worth pricing against a cheap USB audio adapter, which sidesteps the internal audio entirely and costs less than an hour of anybody's time.
Why the order matters
The first step is the hinge and everything after it depends on what it showed.
If the browser plays a tone, the hardware is out of the question — output, Core Audio, socket, cable and speakers are all working — and the silence belongs to an application or to how macOS is routing things. Steps two, three and four are where that lives, and between them they account for nearly everything that gets this far.
If the browser plays nothing, the fault is below every application. The remaining steps are it, in the order they are worth trying: the settings that cost nothing, then the devices other software installed, then Core Audio, then the one step that can end in paying somebody.
Reading the outcome
The wrong output. Sound appears the moment the device is switched in the menu bar. Nothing is broken; a display, an AirPlay speaker or a powered-off Bluetooth device became the selection. If it happens after every sleep it is the display doing it, and unplugging the audio side is not possible — selecting the right output each time, or using a dock that does not carry audio, is the practical fix.
One application only. Everything plays except one program. On a Mac this is always inside that program, because there is nowhere else for it to be. It is the case people spend longest on, purely because they are looking for a mixer that does not exist.
Alerts but no music, or music but no alerts. The sound effects output is pointed somewhere different from the main one. Two pickers, one screen, and almost nobody knows the second one is there.
A device that is not a device. Silence with a healthy-looking interface, cured by selecting the real speakers instead of a name like BlackHole, Krisp or Aggregate Device. Uninstalling whatever created it is the durable fix; selecting around it is the quick one.
Core Audio wedged. Everything looks right, nothing plays, and sudo killall coreaudiod brings it back. Nothing was broken. If it recurs, the cause is upstream — usually a virtual device.
The hardware. Nothing anywhere: not in the browser, not after every setting, and the headphones work on a phone. On a laptop the built-in speakers can fail while the socket stays fine, which is worth establishing before booking a repair, because the two are quoted very differently.
What is different about a Mac
Four of the steps above have no Windows equivalent at all, and two of the Windows steps have no Mac equivalent. That is why a list written for a PC runs out here:
- No volume mixer. Windows 11 gives every running application its own level and its own output device. macOS gives applications neither, so a program that is silent while everything else plays is holding its own setting, and the only place to change it is inside that program.
- A second output for sound effects. System Settings, Sound has a separate device picker for alerts. It is the reason a Mac can play notification sounds perfectly while being silent for everything else, and there is nothing like it in Windows.
- Core Audio instead of services and drivers. Windows has two audio services to restart and a choice of driver to swap. macOS has one process,
coreaudiod, and no driver to change — the support for Apple’s own hardware ships with the system. Restarting that process is the whole of the equivalent step. - Audio devices that are software. Because macOS makes it easy for an application to publish an audio device, meeting and recording tools routinely do. The result is an output list with entries that are not hardware, any of which can be selected and lead nowhere.
- AirPlay and handoff in the output list. A Mac can send audio to a room you are not in, and Apple headphones can leave for a phone by themselves. Both look exactly like a fault and neither is one.
- No SMC or NVRAM reset on Apple Silicon. The two resets every older guide opens with do not exist on an M-series Mac. Following that advice is not dangerous, but it is time spent on a key combination the machine ignores.
When it is not this fault at all
Sound that plays but only on one side is a different problem with a different list, and it is usually the plug or the balance control in Accessibility rather than anything here — the one ear only checklist covers it. Sound that arrives after the picture on AirPods is the Bluetooth delay run, which is a measurement rather than a settings hunt. Sound that plays fine while other people cannot hear you is the microphone path and has its own run, sharing almost none of these causes. And if the machine in front of you is a PC after all, the silence has a different anatomy: the Windows 11 list is the one with the mixer, the services and the driver in it.
This page is for silence: nothing, from anything, or from one app that has gone quiet while the rest of the Mac carries on.
Common questions
Where is the volume mixer on a Mac?
There is not one, and this is the difference that wastes the most time. macOS has a single system volume and no per-application level or per-application output anywhere in the operating system, so the screen that solves this on Windows 11 does not exist here. An application that plays at a different volume or into a different device is doing it in its own settings, which is where you have to go. If you genuinely want a mixer, third-party tools such as Background Music or SoundSource add one — but for a silent app the answer is almost always the app's own output picker, not a new utility.
The volume slider is greyed out and the volume keys do nothing.
That is the signature of a Multi-Output Device or an aggregate being the current output. macOS cannot set the volume of an aggregate — the whole point of one is that it feeds several real devices at once, each with its own level — so it disables the control rather than lying about it. Open Audio MIDI Setup, select your real output, and the slider comes back. The same look happens when the selected output is an HDMI display or an optical connection, because the volume in both cases belongs to the thing on the other end rather than to the Mac.
Should I reset the NVRAM or the SMC?
Only if the Mac has an Intel processor, and even then it is far down this list rather than near the top. On Apple Silicon — M1 and everything after it — neither reset exists any more: there is no SMC to reset, and NVRAM is managed by the system, so the key combinations that older guides open with do nothing at all on a modern Mac. The equivalent step here is restarting Core Audio, which is faster, reversible and does not require a reboot. If you are on an Intel Mac and everything above has failed, an NVRAM reset is worth the two minutes before a repair, not before a settings check.
Sound stopped after a macOS update.
Look at the virtual audio devices first. A major update can leave an audio plug-in from a recording or noise-cancelling tool half-installed, and a half-installed pipe is still selectable as an output. Check what the output list is actually set to, then reinstall or remove the tool with its own installer. The second suspect is the aggregate device, because an update can change which output is default and land on one that was never meant to be heard from. What is almost never the answer is a driver, in the sense a Windows user means it: macOS ships the audio support for its own hardware as part of the system and there is nothing separate to roll back.
Sound works in headphones but not from the built-in speakers.
First check that the output list actually switches back when the plug comes out — if it stays on the headphone entry, select the internal speakers by hand, which rules out a stuck detection switch in the socket. If the Mac does select the speakers and plays nothing through them, that is the one genuine hardware finding on this page: internal speakers fail on their own, most often after liquid, and the headphone path keeps working because it leaves the machine before the amplifier does. On a laptop it is a repair; the honest alternative is any USB or Bluetooth speaker.
Everything goes through the monitor and I cannot hear it.
The display is the selected output. macOS does this by itself whenever a screen is connected over HDMI, DisplayPort or USB-C, because those carry an audio channel whether the panel has a speaker or not. Choose your real output from the Sound icon in the menu bar. If the monitor does have speakers and you want to use them, check its own on-screen menu as well, since the monitor has a volume of its own and it is very often at zero — the Mac cannot see that setting and will show you a full volume slider regardless.
The browser plays a tone but the Mac is silent everywhere else.
That combination is almost always the sound effects output or a per-application setting rather than anything system-wide, because a tone in the browser proves the whole path works. Check Play sound effects through in System Settings, Sound, then open whichever applications are silent and look at their own output setting. If every single application except the browser is silent, close the browser and run the Core Audio restart — one application holding the device in an unusual state is rarer on macOS than on Windows, but it is not impossible.