I don’t know what I broke, but it used to be that when I plugged in headphones I’d hear my music and the system sounds, beeps, alerts, etc, through them. Now, however, I hear music in my headphones, but the system sounds come out my MacBook Air speaker, as if nothing was plugged in. Driving me crazy! How do I fix it?
Usually I start out my answer by assuring you that it’s nothing you did, but in this case there’s a subtle setting in the Mac OS X system Sounds control panel that’s changed and, well, it’s quite likely that it’s something you’ve changed without realizing it. It’s okay, though, no judgment, and it’s easy to fix. 🙂
To start, launch System Preferences… from the Apple menu on the top left corner of your MacBook screen.
It pops up a window with lots of icons. Look for this row:
In this case, it’s Sound that you want, so click on that.
The Sound system preference opens up and it’ll look like this:
Click on “Output” along the top and if your headphones are plugged in, you should see them (or, as I see, the AudioEngine D3 digital audio converter that makes my audio sound 10x better):
Now that you can see that’s set properly, go back to Sound Effects and look more closely at the “Play sound effects through” setting. There are a couple of choices:
Select “Selected sound output device”, as shown, and you’ll solve the problem forever. Or at least until it mysteriously changes again. 🙂
Seven years after you posted this article, it came in very handy. Thank you! 😀
Thanks, this was helpful! Not sure how it got changed to start with, but glad to have it fixed.
advise still works in 2021 – thank you!
I got here from google + well done on an outstanding social media promotion