This article explains what you can do if you are having trouble with your microphone features on your Mac. You may experience various sound issues. For example, Siri may not be able to detect your voice; other people may not be able to hear you during a FaceTime call or you may not be able to record audio. The cause of these problems may be the microphone.
Only Macs that have been purchased new from Apple (or other selected retailers) cones with all of the iLife applications installed as standard, (GarageBand, iMovie etc.). My iMovie application is suddenly 'not supported' on my Mac 10.5.6 with Leopard. I was adding a few clips to my desktop and suddenly it wouldn't open. I restarted my computer, checked for new software and downloaded the newest versions of iMovie and a 10.5.6 update. None of these are working.
Your microphone is an important part of your Mac. Several apps you use and several websites you visit can use the microphone on your Mac to capture or record sound. If your microphone is not working as expected, these websites and apps will be useless.
Configure the microphone settings
On your Mac, go to Apple menu > System Preferences > Sound > Input and select a mic (built-in internal one usually) and check the input levels. Does the input level moves when you say something? Ntfs for mac 10 5 8. If so, that means that your microphone is working.
Restart your Mac
It is simple but effective. Simply restart your Mac to see if your problem is fixed. You can restart your Mac by going to Apple menu > Restart.
Check app permissions
If you are having a microphone issue when you are trying to use a specific app (such as Skype, Hangouts, etc). You can control which apps to allow to access the microphone. Here is how you can control permissions:
- On your Mac, click Apple menu > System Preferences, click Security & Privacy, then click Privacy.
- Select Microphone (left menu).
- And check the box next to an app (e.g. Skype).
If giving permissions does not solve it, and if you are having microphone issues for specific apps, like Skype, etc, it is possible that the app itself is faulty. If this is the case, there three two things you can try:
- Does this app have a microphone or sound settings? Check these settings and make sure that they are set correctly.
- Remove the app from your computer and then reinstall it.
- Contact the developer of the app.
Turn on dictation
Enabling Dictation will cause your Mac to download specific audio drivers which may resolve your issue. Here is how you can:
- Open System Preferences on your Mac.
- Click Keyboard.
- Click the Dictation tab.
- Click On and click Enable Dictation to confirm.
Reset PRAM
Resetting PRAM (or NVRAM) may fix this problem. Your Mac stores several settings in PRAM. One of the settings is sound. Thus resetting this may help you. Here is how:
- Turn off your Mac.
- Turn on your Mac and immediately press and hold the Option, Command, P, and R keys together. Keep holding these keys for about 20 seconds.
- Then release the keys, your computer will restart.
There are several settings that will be erased when you do this like your sound volume, display resolution settings. After you do this, you may want to go to System Preferences and adjust your settings.
Safe Mode
Restart your Mac in Safe Mode. Safe Mode performs certain checks that may fix your problem. Here is how:
- Turn off your Mac.
- Turn on your Mac and immediately press and hold the Shift key until you see the login screen.
- Login. You may have to enter your password a few times.
- Your computer will start in Safe Mode. Does your microphone work now?
- In either case (working or not working), restart your Mac normally. This time do not press any keys while starting.
- Your computer will exit Safe Mode.
- Check again now if your Microphone starts working.
So you tried everything and nothing helped you? You may be having a hardware problem. You may want to make a Genius Bar appointment and take your computer to Apple to check.
See also: How To Add or Remove Microphone Button on iPhone or iPad Keyboard
'I am having an issue with iMovie 11 audio, one of my event libraries has been somehow compromised and when I playback the video there is no sound. But there is sound on other events, and there is sometimes sound in the projects that used the events. When I reveal the clip in the finder there is no problem at all with the clip. Is there anything I can do to jolt iMovie to rescan or reimport the contents of the event so that I may work with the files without audio issues? Of note, at the time the files were imported into iMovie everything was fine. There must just be some bug somewhere that is messing things up.'
If your iMovie project appears to be missing one or more audio tracks when you play, import, or export a project, try these steps first:
1. Make sure the audio track has not been muted in the timeline.
2. See if the volume in iMovie is set to its lowest, if this is the case, set the volume slider to maximum.
3. Make sure the computer's audio is not muted.
4. Quit and reopen iMovie, then check the clip to see if it now plays with audio.
5. Quit and reopen iMovie, then reimport the footage. Play the newly imported footage and see if you now have audio.
6. If you are using an analog to DV converter instead of a camera, make sure the audio connections are good between your VCR or other analog device and the converter. Check the documentation that came with your converter for more information.
7. Check /Library/QuickTime/ and ~/Library/QuickTime/ for any third-party plugins. Remove them if present, log out, and log back in. Check to see if the issue persists. If not, check with the manufacturer of the disabled plugin to see if an update is available. Note: The tilde (~) represents your Home directory.
8. Sublime download mac. Check to see if any of the video clips you have imported are in the MPEG-1 format. MPEG-1 clips will lose audio when you export them as part of your iMovie project.
Imovie Won't Open On Ipad
We can easily fixed the first seven issues by ourselves, if there are still no sound in your iMovie project, the problems must be result from the last issue, which means that the some of the video clips you have imported to iMovie are in the MPEG-1 format. To solve this problem, we can use some third-party converting program such as Pavtube iMedia Converter for Mac to encode iMovie project to AIC(Apple Intermediate Codec), which features high performance and quality, being less processor intensive to work with than other editing formats.
How to convert MPEG-1 iMovie Project to AIC?
Step 1: Load iMovie project to the program.
Click 'Add Video' icon to import iMovie project to the program.
Step 2: Select output profile format.
From its drop-down option list, you can select 'Apple InterMediate Codec(*.mov)' as the output file format.
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Step 3: Convert iMovie Video project to AIC.
Imovie Not Opening
When the conversion is done, hit right-bottom 'convert' button to start the conversion process.
