coreaudiod constantly at around 12.5% CPU on Catalina

user_4689991 0
Viewed 8629

I've upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, and I noticed the fans on my MacBook Pro (15", 2019) are making a lot of noise. I looked into the Activity Monitor, and noticed that coreaudiod is constantly at around 12.5% CPU (dropping to no less than 12.2% at times).

I looked around for similar issues, and it seems that the solution is always to restart the service, which I did but it made no difference: The moment it goes back up, within seconds it's back at 12.5%.

I also tried rebooting, and tried closing certain apps and waiting to see if that might calm coreaudiod down, but no luck.

Do I have any other options, or do I just need to hope it's a bug with Catalina that Apple's aware of and that they'll release a fix soon?

I wouldn't mind it so much if the constant whirring of the fans didn't drive me crazy.

macos-catalina core-audio macos
4 Answers

I haven't found any effect from creating the ~/Library/Preferences/Audio directory, but as others have mentioned, sometimes the problem can be caused by a particular app that uses audio. To this end, running lsof | grep -i coreaudio in a terminal can help find what this app might be. Quit the apps it returns one by one until the CPU usage stops.

The problem app in my case was, surprisingly, NightOwl, a menubar widget for automatically switching dark/light modes. It plays an owl sound when it switches, but apparently it doesn't release some audio resource afterwards. I hope Apple can find a way to make the system audio interface less prone to this sort of thing.

user_105329900

The problem seems to be that the Audio preferences folder is missing for your user. I solved this with a variation of the solution linked to by dafal:

  1. Create a new user on the Mac
  2. Log in as the new user
  3. Copy the folder ~/Library/Preferences/Audio somewhere where your main user can reach it – a USB stick for example. I copied it to the Public folder of my main user.
  4. Log out and log back in as your main user
  5. Copy the Audio folder into ~/Library/Preferences of your main user.

For me, the fans stopped running within seconds after I did this. I verified that coreaudiodwas down to 0.0% cpu. No restart was necessary.

(To access the Library folder in the Finder, hold down the shift key while you open the "Go" menu. One of the items in the menu will be "Library").

user_2397750

Posting one more answer just in case someone has the same issue as I had.

So I had the same issue - coreaudiod was using 10-12% of cpu all the time. I've tried the accepted answer, and it didn't help.

The reason in my case was that I was using Citrix to access my remote PC. There is a bug in Citrix - https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/397283-receiver-1291-high-cpu-10-coreaudiod/.

Any sound delivered by Citrix Viewer from the target system, causes coreaudiod to consume ~10% CPU.

So the solution for me was to completely mute any sounds on my remote machine. That did help in my case.

user_13462120

The problem for me was VMWare. I didn't even have a VM running, but if VMWare is open, coreaudiod seems to spike from 1-3% to 10-15%

user_13793720
Related