SWMBO's iMac will play streaming audio, and will play audio frorm an MP3 file. But when playing a video from YouTube or Facebook, the video plays with no audio.

I know even less about Macintosh computers than I do about Windows (no small achievement there!) and have no idea where to start looking to fix this. It is a recent problem, the computer used to work properly.

The problem persists whether playing through the USB headphones or through the build-in iMac speakers.

tanstaafl.

What version of the OS is running on the iMac? (Apple menu in the top left - About this Mac) It's likely to be a name of a large cat if it's older (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion), or some California place (Mavericks, Yosemite).

What web browser is she using?

Is Flash installed? If so, what version? (If she's using Safari, check the Help menu for "Installed Plugins" to see if Flash is listed. If it's Chrome, Firefox, or another browser, typing "about:plugins" into the URL bar should also show if Flash is installed.)

Also, a common Mac troubleshooting step is to isolate the problem to her user account, or the machine in general. To do this, follow these steps:

• Go to the Apple menu - System Preferences
• Find Users and Groups - usually in the bottom left
• Click the lock in the bottom left, and type in the password to unlock
• Click on Login Options, and check "Show fast user switching menu as".
• For the dropdown at the end of "Show fast user switching menu as", set it to full name.
• Click the plus located below the Login Options button and create a new user.
• New Account: Standard is fine, full name and account name could just be "test".
• You may need to first select "Use separate password" before being able to set the password to "test" as well
• Click Create user

At this point there should be a new item in the menu bar in the upper right with her full name. Click on that and pick the test user. Type the test password in, and you should get a new user login screen. Try opening the browser there and seeing if the same issue persists.

When done testing under the other account, go to the Apple menu in the upper left, and pick "Log Out Test" at the bottom. You should then be back at a log in screen and can return to her account.

Answering the 3 questions above and doing the separate user test will help narrow the issue down a lot.

Tom --

My apologies for delaying this response for so long.

I solved the problem last night after a deep and detailed study and technical analysis. It turns out there was a toolbar at the top of the screen with a speaker icon that said "0%" when moused over. After moving the slider bar over to something like 60%, the audio worked as it was supposed to.

I don't know if that toolbar is an Apple OS thing, or some add-on. SWMBO is terrible about adding things. If it strikes her fancy, she'll just click on the install button without regard for consequences. If she had a Windows machine, it would no doubt by now be completely dysfunctional.

tanstaafl.

You mean like this toolbar at the top of this screen?

(The pic is the normal Apple operating system screen with the normal apple volume control on the main menu bar. It's the same kind of thing as windows, just in a different part of the screen.)

Yeah, that's the one.

It seems odd, though, that her iMac would play audio from MP3 files but not from videos.

tanstaafl.

Doug, don't feel too sheepish about the volume control thing. I spent about five hours last night in the following way:

After reviewing all 4000 mp3 files, altering tags as needed and renaming files to a common standard, I felt it was time to fire up emplode and think about reloading the files on the player, rebuilding the soup playlists, etc.

Oddly, emplode could not find the player. I tried jemplode with similar results. I disconnected the ethernet cable a few times, saw that the little blue light came on when reattached. Huh. Took a look at "Info" and saw that the IP address was 169.254.71.192. I powered off the empeg to refresh it's DHCP assigned address, but the address remained the same. I rebooted my laptop, and it functioned normally -- got a DHCP assigned address and had internet access, the works.

There is no provision to change the address manually on the player, so I fired up the SUSE Linux machine (with the serial port connected via null modem cable to the empeg). From minicom (a serial console application similar to old Windows' Terminal program) I did a CTRL-C and caused the player to hiccup, and got a message:



I searched the troubleshooting forum and found that my problem was that my kernel was a consumer version, not the developer version. The consumer version doesn't provide a shell, the developer one does.

Sigh. So, I located the 2.00 developer kernel for the MK II player, ran empegUpgrade.exe through Wine (a windows emulator for Linux) and flashed the player with the new kernel. The player rebooted and as expected, Hijack was no longer there. Something else to fix.

For now though, I stayed on task and went back to minicom and did a CTRL-C and the player halted and went into a shell. Yay! I looked around and couldn't find the "config.ini" anywhere. I searched the forums and found that it lives in "/empeg/var" and sure enough there it was. I looked at the file and saw the field for IP address and also "DHCP=1". Setting DHCP to 0 would be a good start, I thought. I looked for something to edit the file with (vi, ed) and struck out. Sed is there though, so I did a



The resulting output looked like the change was being made correctly, so I redirected the output to a temp file (before replacing the actual config.ini) and was told something like "Error writing file, readonly file system".

Jeez. (Shaking head) What's it take, anyway?

So, rather than try to remember how to remount the file system as read/write (I sensed that things would really start getting balled up) I thought that maybe I could put my laptop on the same subnet as the player and access it that way. I grabbed an old Belkin four port switch / wireless router and connected the empeg and the laptop to it, via ethernet cables. From the laptop I brought up the admin interface on the Belkin at 192.168.1.1, logged in (I remembered the password, yay!), and went to the LAN settings panel. I set it's address to 169.254.71.1 and hit save. Quite correctly, it told me no, please use non-routeable address space. Gah!

It was about this time that I went back over to the empeg and looked at the IP address on the About menu. It was 192.168.1.17. What the hell?

It dawned on me that I had never actually looked at the switch that the empeg normally connects to. It's an old Linksys... Instead of the usual display of blinking LEDs corresponding to cables connected to it, one light was on solidly. I powered it down, and powered it back up, it looked fine. I reconnected the empeg to it, and everything worked fine. The reason that the laptop worked is that it skips that switch and connects wirelessly to our router.

So, all I ever had to do in the first place was turn the Linksys off then back on.

Heh. I used to have networking issues with my empegs, way way back when I was using a first-generation Linksys 10/100 hub.

They've all been fine over the years since updating to newer generation hubs and (later) switches.

Cheers

The menu volume control and the volume keys on the keyboard both control the default system audio volume. On a Mac, it will typically change the default to a USB device/headset when it's plugged in, and revert to the built in speakers when unplugged. Web browsers tend to use the default audio device.

How was she playing back the MP3 files? An app like iTunes can use a non default audio device. When a non default device is picked, it's volume control is separate from the system default volume control For example I can have my iTunes app play music to my remote speakers in the living room. When I do this, the system volume control doesn't change the volume in the living room, but iTunes does offer a different slider that lets me change the living room volume.

That's my guess about why it would play MP3 files while the system volume was muting videos.

I just used Finder to locate some random MP3 file, double-clicked it, and it played.

tanstaafl.

It sounds like whatever app she has set to playback MP3s (iTunes by default) was handling it. iTunes will play whatever was double clicked without popping up it's UI, and other media apps may do similar on OS X.


This touches on an aspect that has me excited about where I see computing advancing right now, especially as shown by iOS. I think one of the most damaging things that hindered the adoption of technology benefitting more lives on this planet was the poor security of Windows right when the internet started getting popular. It did make people afraid to use the system at times, due to clicking on something and being infected by some crap. It's a shame that so many who cleaned up this mess often times blamed the end user.

The attitude of "users need to be more aware of the consequences" of such actions as installing software to me speaks to a failure of the computing industry more then it speaks to a failure of that user.

Seeing the older members of my family browse the App Store on their own, resulting in them adding functionality to their devices without fear has empowered them. I want to keep seeing that empowerment in more and more people, no matter their age or experience with computers.

I'm glad to see both Microsoft and Apple push on to make computer based technology easier and more resilient. Microsoft dropping their mentality of the past and more directly engaging consumers has helped them quite a bit. Windows 8 was a bit of a stumble, but seeing their intentions show through more with Windows 10 is good. Still work ahead on both sides. Apple enables more powerful workflows on iOS with every release, while in parallel they add new ideas from iOS into OS X.

While it is true that the possibility of getting a virus or trojan was scary to some people, I'd have to say that it did little to curb the enthusiastic growth of technology back then. I operated one of our towns' early ISPs, and we had a marvelous tech support crew. Most of our customers were folks who had "click joy" and were happy to click on anything. They needed help at times due to clicking the wrong thing, but they were happy.

There were a few silent customers, the kind you heard from only when they set up their account, then they never called in again. In the early days, there weren't many of those. The dial up technology was so bad that you really did need some outside help at times.

Then there were the timid users, who were afraid of their computers, and these were the ones who required the most help. Some were frightened of doing the wrong thing, as though an errant key stroke or mouse click would cause the machine to die. Others just had no computer savvy, and were we wondered what had motivated them to get online.

Largely, the timid users didn't seem specifically afraid of viruses or trojans; their fear was of technology itself. The fact that there was malware (it wasn't called that at the time) bolstered their fears, but I think that they would have been timid users anyway. The technology was hard to use, on both Apple and Windows operating systems.

[Aside: something that I often told my tech support guys after they'd get of the phone with a particularly 'dumb' customer was "Remember that everyone is an expert in something. You happen to be expert at personal computer technology. The person on the other is expert at something else and they could talk circles around you in that subject. So, what you are doing is teaching them your area. Have faith, they'll get better." As a result, my crew largely did not blame the end user for their computers failings.]

Anyway, rather than Windows' lack of security, I'd say that the problem was the difficulty of use. "User Friendly" was an oft touted phrase back then and while it undoubtedly helped sell whatever was being marketed, it was almost always a lie. Everyone reading this can think of countless times that a piece of software has behaved in an unexpected way. User friendly, my eye.

I too am glad to see Microsoft and Apple trying to make the technology easier and more resilient. Really, it's Microsoft acknowledging that Apple has the right idea and needs to catch up. (This from a Windows user.) And while it is true that some things have improved greatly since those early days of 14.4kbps dial up using Trumpet Winsock, the user must still be aware.

Malware is crafted daily, using state-of-the-art technology. Hacks of large networks make the news several times a year, and smaller hacks go unreported. Identity theft is a growing concern. These are some of the reasons why users need to be aware of the consequences, now and for the foreseeable future.

Great reply and thanks for sharing. Specifically wanted to thank you for this part:

A lot of my own tech upbringing ended up being around a lot of the BOFH types, and it had a negative influence on me I hadn't realized until years later. I cringe around coworkers who still carry this type of negative mentality forward these days, and gently try to guide them away from it.



Great point, and I've had a lot of experience with these types of users. The security issues of Windows in the late 90's managed to help reinforce those fears in some, after having to hand over hundreds of dollars to places like Best Buy simply from plugging the computer into the internet. My frustrations from that time were in seeing that most of the security issues Microsoft had were similar issues Unix systems had already encountered and fixed a decade or more earlier. I probably overestimate the impact at times, as I was one of the people working in customer support during that era cleaning up the mess. For some customers, the only solution they accepted was refunds of the computer, and them shrugging of tech at that time. It was an interesting era to work in a department that reported direct to the CEO of a major computer manufacturer tasked with making the customer happy after the most extreme of problems.


Very true. When OS X came out, it attracted my attention because it was Unix. I had spent a number of years prior to 2001 learning more about other Unix variants like Solaris and BSD. What I quickly fell in love with was the true user friendly approaches in the system. This came in more from programs like iPhoto that Apple bundled. Plug in digital camera, photos show up on screen, and one button away from importing them to the computer. Management of the photos was then done by people manipulating the photos instead of the files named IMG_0001.jpg. All that file structure still existed, but was abstracted away from the user. People who still want to manage and work with the files directly still could, by using the Image Capture app to import off the camera instead of iPhoto. Power users were empowered with smart folders that could allow them to replicate some handy organization aspects of iPhoto. Later full RAW support was added at the system level, continuing to empower the pro photo taker. An OS and bundled apps that delivered a solid photo management solution to users of all skill levels in 2002-2005 left a lasting impression on me.


Thanks for providing fuel for possible nightmares tonight (My early tech career was at dial-up ISPs, initially on the support side before jumping to the admin side.)

I was still in the game when OS X came out and I too was intrigued by it, largely due to it being a *nix variant. I was properly impressed when I brought up a shell on an OS X machine and did a bunch of shell commands. Wow! Now there was an Apple I could get on board with. Somehow I never managed to bring a OS X machine into my life, and I still am dealing with IMG_0001.jpg. Who knows, I might still one day bring an Apple into the house. It would be fun learning the intricacies.

More nightmare material: we distributed various network utilities to people on a single 3.5" floppy disk in the early years. It included things like WinFTP, Eudora, Netscape, and of course, Trumpet Winsock. To make matters worse, I had contrived a DOS batch file to install everything and attempt to get some of the configuration right. What a balled up mess that was! I think that it worked correctly about 1% of the time, due to both my poor scripting skills and other peoples path names, drive letters, etc.

Anyway, I was on the phone helping a nice lady edit non-functioning batch file on her computer. I forget exactly what we were working on at the moment... I told her, "C colon enter."

There was a stunned silence on the other end. "What?!" We immediately burst into laughter, and I don't know about her but I had tears running down my cheeks.

Thank you for taking me back to those earlier days -- great fun.

I had a similar reaction, and had wandered off to a local Apple Reseller during the launch of OS X. The owner of the place spotted me in Terminal typing commands he didn't understand. Thankfully his intrigue won out over any feelings of "this random person is breaking my demo machine". That resulted in a friendship that lasts to this day, and I've bought all my personal Apple machines from him ever since.


There's one person that really helped me dig deeper into OS X, even before I had my hands on it. John Siracusa. He's written in depth articles about OS X since the second developer preview in 1999, though sadly he's retired the series with last years 10.10 release.

He still provides great insights and amusement on podcasts he's part of. One of the more amusing aspects is when Cards Against Humanity sponsors a tech podcast he's part of. CAH will send John a toaster oven to review on air in place of a traditional ad read. His cohost offers more details on how this became a thing. http://www.caseyliss.com/2015/9/10/siracusa-on-toasters