coreaudiod constantly at around 12.5% CPU on Catalina

Question

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.

Answer 1

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").