Video & Audio Streaming Problem after Sleep

[SkiHound2]

This is both a suggestion and question:

Youtube, Vimeo, any video streaming and Itunes worked great after a restart. But when I returned after some period of sleep I could not stream video or audio from any source. It would look like buffering and then I'd get a message saying that if video doesn't start playing soon try restarting your machine. I was doing some online searches and found someone saying that their USB speakers would lock after sleep and that to use audio or video they needed to restart. Well, that's what's happening to me. After sleep with video/audio not streaming, as soon as I change the speakers from the external USB speakers to internal computer speaker everything immediately works as intended. I need to either restart the computer or unplug and replug the USB cable. Seems they don't reconnect after the computer wakes from sleep. So, the good news is I finally isolated what was happening. And if you're having similar issues I suggest you at least look at these issues.

The bad news is I don't know how to fix it beyond unplugging and replugging the USB connection. If anyone has any brilliant ideas on that I'd love to hear them.

 

[Fishrrman]

Which Mac do you have?
Which OS are you using?

Sometimes, you just have to do "what works", even if it's a "clunky workaround" (like unplugging and re-plugging the speakers).

You wrote:
"as soon as I change the speakers from the external USB speakers to internal computer speaker everything immediately works as intended."

What did you use to do this?
Was it the "Sound" pref pane, or "Audio/MIDI Setup" ?

If you used the Sound pref pane, you -might- try opening Audio/MIDI Setup next time and changing the sound output there. No promises, just something to try.

I'm going to -guess- that the speakers are "going to sleep on you", almost as if they were a drive "sleeping" -- and in doing so, they drop their "connection" to the Mac's USB port. The physical act of unplugging and REplugging them "wakes them up" again.

Do you also keep any external USB drives connected?
If the answer is "no", you might try:
- go to Energy Saver pref pane
- UNCHECK "put hard drives to sleep when possible".
You never know, it might help.

 

[SkiHound2]

That's what I think. The speakers go to sleep and when the computer wakes the speakers don't, so the USB doesn't see them. Just never would've guessed anything like that was the problem. Well, I connected via headphone out and that seems to have solved the problem.