Occasionally coreaudiod will scan your local network to see if there are any supported devices, meaning its normal to sometimes see this daemon attempt to connect to local devices.
Well, coreaudiod powers the audio portion of AirPlay, which lets you mirror your display and audio to AppleTV and a few other supported audio receivers.
If you use a Mac firewall like Little Snitch, you may occasionally notice coreaudiod trying to access devices on the local network. For this reason coreaudiod will take up a little bit of CPU power any time you hear audio through your speakers, or record something using your microphone. On the Mac, Core Audio encompasses recording, editing, playback, compression and decompression, MIDI, signal processing, file stream parsing, and audio synthesis.īasically, if sound comes out of your speaker, or is recorded with a microphone, coreaudiod had a part in it. A daemon is a process that runs in the background of your Mac you can identify them by the “d” at the end of their names.īut what is Core Audio? Well, according to Apple’s Developer portal, it handles basically everything about sound on your Mac. This particular process, coreaudiod, is the daemon that powers Core Audio, the low-level API for sound on macOS.
Don’t know what those services are? Better start reading! This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Activity Monitor, like kernel_task, hidd, mdsworker, installd, WindowServer, blued, launchd, dbfseventsd, and many others. RELATED: What Is This Process and Why Is It Running on My Mac?
What does that do, and could it be causing problems? So you saw something called “coreaudiod” while browsing Activity Monitor.