Move your External Headphones to the left so their color is assigned to channels 1 and 2. You can drag-and-drop the names of the devices to change the order.

When I did this, it had VS248 on the left and External Headphones on the right, which was assigning the monitor to channels 1 and 2, and the headphones to channels 3 and 4. That will make them appear in Subdevices above. Click the checkboxes under Use for “External Headphones” and your monitor. Then of course there are the internal microphone and speakers of the Mac itself.Ĭlick the little plus sign at the bottom left, and choose Create Aggregate Device. “External Headphones” is my speakers, plugged into the MacBook Pro’s headphone jack. You’ll see something like this… but without the last item, which is the aggregate device I already created, much like a TV chef who already has a finished dish waiting in the oven.

Hopefully you’ve never had to open this little utility before, because I doubt anyone who works in interface design at Apple ever has. What’s that? I’ll show you.įirst go into Applications > Utilities and open Audio MIDI Setup. What’s the solution? Create an aggregate device. It also maybe just fixes one annoying issue I always had with my speaker setup: I would have to turn the Mac’s volume all the way up to get adequate output to the speakers, which have their own volume control. It’s a completely asinine scenario, and the solution is even more asinine, but it does seem to work. president, police in my neighborhood murdering Black people, riots in my neighborhood over police murdering Black people, climate change-induced forest fires destroying California, murder hornets), my MacBook Pro has suddenly decided that it must try to send audio output to my HDMI monitor whenever it’s plugged in, even though the monitor doesn’t have speakers, and I have a set of speakers plugged into the headphone jack. How has it come to this? It’s 2020, and on top of everything else (a global pandemic, an incompetent and megalomaniacal U.S.

Macbook pro audio output