I report here some messages from Apple Community for an untracked bug in macOS Sonoma (from 14.0 to 14.2 beta 4 at the time). https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255214328
Original message 1: I've finally noticed a pattern that occurs rather frequently on macOS Sonoma. I was blaming Bluetooth issues before, but it looks like it's more about audio in general.
What happens is that at some point, all audio freezes. The hotkeys for the audio controls show "Stop" sign, like there are no audio outputs connected, the taskbar is completely unresponsive: Control Centre shows a spinning circle, the sidebar is not opening (Spotlight works, though).
If you go to the System Settings, some menu items will be unresponsive: Sound doesn't open, Bluetooth does not open, Accessibility and Siri & Spotlights all do not open.
Then, a new bug appeared that I've just started to notice recently. The screen is flashing like there's an Accessibility feature enabled that uses warning flash instead of sound. It appears just randomly, out of nowhere. Immediately after that, sound works just normally.
When this is happening, and video/audio content in the browser and wherever does not work, Tidal shows many random errors, and Firefox just completely hangs when you try to play a video on YouTube. I've tried to stop coreaudiod and it did restart the daemon, but nothing else happened.
The device is a very fresh M1 Max MacBook, and nothing like that was happening on Ventura. I've had audio cracks on another M1 Pro laptop, but this one didn't even have those.
P.S. This is happened just when I was writing this post, and I've disabled Bluetooth just before. Now, the Bluetooth section in the Settings is opening, but others are still unresponsive.
For reference - I have yabai and BetterSnapTool installed, which modify system behavior, but with system protection enabled. Siri is disabled. I've tried to stop a bunch of random processes when this happened, but none helped so far.
This issue constantly haunts me since I've upgraded, and it's extremely annoying.
Original message 2: Yes, I'm thinking it's a combination of Bluetooth and audio issues. I've got all apps that are trying to use audio crashing after I'm just connecting my Bluetooth earbuds.
Now I see that the coreaudiod is just not running this time - I've tried to connect to a Slack Huddle, and it just hanged, sound is unresponsive again and the Settings app is not working as I mentioned before.
I've checked the Activity Monitor and found that the process that works with audio on macOS (coreaudiod) is not running. I've attempted to launch coreaudiod with sudo launchctl load /system/library/launchdaemons/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plis, and got Load failed: 5: Input/output error as a response.
After a while, when I disabled the earbuds it's started again on its own and coreaudiod is running, and the audio controls are working once more.
Original message 3:
Just accidentally looked at the Console App while looking for logs for other things, and found out that my codeaudiod crashing by cooldown every day 10 to 50 times with intervals from 1 second to a couple of hours, around 5 minutes on average. The crash is the following:
Crashed Thread: 18 Dispatch queue: com.apple.audio.device.~:AMS2_StackedOutput:0.event
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000000
I also found that avconferenced fails too occasionally, though very rare - I believe that's the process that connects iPad as a second screen, and it _too fails with sigsegv on 0x0 - though not that it's some unique bug to attempt to read memory at 0, maybe just a coincidence. @Flomaster do you use Sidecar by chance?
My message: I too have this problem on my MacBook Pro M2 Pro since upgrading to macOS Sonoma. It mainly occurs with AirPods Pro 2 but I have also had this happen to me using OnePlus Buds.
The blockages are the same as you have experienced and, as I often work in video conferences, blocking MS Teams or Google Meet is really becoming a serious problem.
Desperate, I tried installing macOS Sonoma 14.2 beta but none of the updates solved the problem. I even tried a full restore, re-importing the data from Time Machine but to no avail. Indeed, with Beta 4 the problem seems to have worsened because the AirPods now even struggle to connect.
