For a while, we’ve noticed that occasionally, iChat will stop making noise when people message us. This is bad, since we don’t notice, and sometimes the person in question is the boss. The only action we’ve seen thus far that fixes it, though, is a reboot, which is way overkill for something like this. Searching Apple’s message boards didn’t yield anything for a long time, but today we finally hit pay dirt here, which points us to this blog post from a similarly geeky Mac guy named Dan.

We’ll reproduce his instructions here for posterity:

[UPDATE] Ok, so I found another temporary fix just short of rebooting. If I kill the coreaudiod process and start up iChat again, I get my sound effects a.k.a. alerts back. To do that, I opened up Terminal, ran:

$ ps -aux | grep coreaudio

To get the process ID as can be seen here:

root 32 0.3 0.2 29808 1816 ?? Ss Tue02PM 1:10.80 /usr/sbin/coreaudiod

The process ID is 32. So then I quit iChat, and ran this to kill the coreaudiod process:

$ sudo kill 32

Then start iChat and you should hear the familiar alert sounds again. Yay!

Good *nixheads out there may wonder if doing a kill -HUP might not work; we don’t know, but we’re planning on trying it next time around.