Thursday, September 24, 2009

Switching audio output device in Snow Leopard

audio selection.pngJust discovered this nifty tip, to switch the current default audio input or output in Snow Leopard, hold down the Option key and click the sound icon in the menu bar and you get this menu.

In the past this functionality used to come from a piece of software called Sound Menu that itself used something alarmingly called Menu Cracker.

I enjoy the extra audio quality that comes with an external audio USB DAC and specialised amplifier and it's vital to be able to switch easily.

Some of the other little menu icons include extra items if clicked with the Option key down, Sync tells you what was sunk, bluetooth has some debugging tools, and the Apple menu changes a little.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for your tip! i was very pissed off... every time i boot my imac running osx 10.6.1 i had to select manually the output device (a m-audio firewire 410).

is there any chance to make it the default output?

on osx 10.5 i selected it once and had no problems...

kim said...

thank you for the tip , just got a macbook pro and couldn't get the sound out on my hifi. I downloaded sound menu and now works fine.

audio brisbane said...

That's a great tip. You wouldn't want to miss on great quality files and hardware.