Maybe someone here could help me a bit. I was recently trying out various audio apps to see if I could figure out a way to get Air Play speakers as a default audio source for my M1 MacBook Air. Turns out this isn’t currently possible. However, in the process I installed Boom Audio and after I uninstalled it I started to notice a lot of audio focus issues. For instance, if I have a YouTube video playing in Safari and I change focus to another window the audio and eventually the video will glitch. This is also happening in other apps that use audio and video like Zoom and the like. I don’t want to have to restore my entire OS so I was hoping that there was a way to just restore the audio and maybe the video settings but I’m unsure of a safe way to do this. Your wisdom here would be greatly appreciated.
edit: I’ve added a link to a short video so you can experience the phenomenon.
Doing more testing I can reproduce the problem when Discord is running. I’m now suspicious about whether that is the offending app since it doesn’t handle audio in a conventional way. But I’ve also experienced the problem in Zoom and Skype.
It’s not just Discord. It happens with any app. Oh, also, if it’s unclear I’m using an M1 Mac so there is no way to reset PRAM. That would have been a troubleshooting step in the past. Alas, no such manual option is possible.
I’ve done more testing and it seems like this only happens when certain apps are running. So far I’ve identified Discord and Spark as two apps that cause this behavior.
I have a solution. Turns out the problem wasn’t Boom Audio. The problem was App Tamer. After finally deleting the offending app everything works fine again. I apologize to Boom for my hasty accusations and promise to buy it flowers.