Playback device error issue

Hi, I have used audacity for at least 2 years and there is a lot to like but one of the most frustrating things is the ability to select and change the Audio playback devices.

What have found is that you cannot change between audio playback devices (such as airplay, Sonos, external headphones) without having to completely quit the entire program and restart which feels incredibly basic and surely a glitch in the software somewhere.

If you try and swap between any other playback option aside from going back to the internal macbook pro speakers it either just doesn’t show you the option on the list in preferences of on the main window itself or it brings up an error window as per the attached. It is beyond frustrating.

If I am listening to audacity on external headphones, then the headphones get removed from the computer and put back in again the same error window comes up.

I use Mac OS Monterey 12.5.1 and audacity 3.2.4. No matter what version of audacity I use the problem is still there.

Please audacity can you get back to me regarding how to fix this issue. I can’t believe that this is normal and must be a quick fix.

Cheers, Phil
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Audacity please can you respond as I have been told that this they only way to contact you. For some reason you don’t seem to have a technical department…Thanks

We’re all volunteers here. You posted at 5:17 am my local time.

Audacity is known not to play well with bluetooth devices on Mac. If a bluetooth devices loses connection, even momentarily, you will get that error message.

Try Transport (menu) > Rescan Audio Devices.

– Bill

Hi, thanks so much for the response although can’t see where the ‘transport’ tab is in the menu. Can you let me know?

Also this is crazy that there is no technical support, how do they fix bugs and issues that people have if no one can actually change the software? Who does the updates that come through every now and again. Surely there has to be a technical team for audacity?

Look in Audacity’s main menu:

File | Edit | Select | View | Transport | Tracks | Generate | Effect | Analyze | Tools

There’s many support sources available for Audacity:

Older sources that are being phased out:
The manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/
The wiki: Missing features - Audacity Support


Bugs may be reported directly to the developers on the Audacity GitHub “Issues” page: Issues · audacity/audacity · GitHub though I would recommend asking about the issue here on the forum first as there’s a good chance that if it’s a real bug it will have already been logged.


The development team has been run by muse group Careers — Muse Group since 2021. As Audacity is open source, anyone can submit new features or fixes via “pull requests” to the GitHub repository (Creating a pull request - GitHub Docs). Pull requests will be reviewed by the development team, and if accepted, will be merged into the Audacity code base (this can be a slow process).

This is really helpful, thank you so much I will look into it!


You nailed it!!!

Complete legend! Thank you, that seems to do the job perfectly, I couldn’t see it as I was just looking in preferences. Thank you.