So if videos aren’t playing in Safari, or any other device, and you’ve enabled Multi-Output Device, then check this setting. Stop when you’ve enabled all of the devices without the video stopping.If the video stops, then disable the device, and enable a different one.In general, I think the order that works is to first enable the Built-In Output, then your hardware audio interfaces, then internal software mixers like BlackHole/Soundflower or ZoomAudioDevice. In the Multi-Output Device, enable the devices, one at a time.It should begin playing, likely using your built-in Mac speakers.,

Next, in Preferences, select the Multi-Output Device as your Sound output.

If it still doesn’t play, it may be some other problem and I don’t think these instructions will help. If the video plays, then it’s the Multi-Output Device.

Before you start, try selecting the Built-In Output as the sound output.If you have one of these, the order in which your audio devices are enabled MATTERS! I can’t tell you right now what the right order is, but I can tell you how you can diagnose this. Turns out that the order in which you enable these matters and that you need to enable them in the right order. If you do pro audio on your Mac, or if you do streaming, you might have created a “Multi-Output Device” to use multiple audio interfaces simultaneously. It might be your audio Multi-Output Device I was suspicious that it wasn’t an installation issue and that it was some kind of setup bug. The problem didn’t go away until we did a refresh reinstall of Big Sur.īut then this issue happened on my old Catalina iMac (early 2013) as I was setting up audio.

I actually spent over two hours with Apple Support as they walked through everything they could think of, from resetting SMC and NVRAM and browser settings. The strange thing is that it happened on my Mac Mini (2018) with Big Sur with Twitch and YouTube, it happened on every browser, it didn’t happen on my other Macs, and it didn’t happen on any of my other devices. YouTube wouldn’t play videos – it wouldn’t play ads, it would just spin like below: If you see eternal spinning on a YouTube video, and you’ve used the Audio MIDI Setup to set up a Multi-Output Device, you might have a problem. Here’s a rather insidious problem I encountered this weekend.

Change mac sound output