iChat, Snow Leopard, and broken audio workaround

If you’re having audio issues with iChat on Snow Leopard (no audio, only one person gets audio, etc.)—particularly if you have a Time Capsule and a MobileMe account—here’s an unfortunate workaround:

Try turning off Back to My Mac.

I turned it off in System Prefs on both Macs in question, and also turned off Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol on the Time Capsule and audio during chats and screen sharing works again.

Hopefully Apple has a fix for it (and for the damn annoying status message bug with AIM accounts) soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Apple, Mac OS X. You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS feed.

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7 Replies to iChat, Snow Leopard, and broken audio workaround:

Reply

kaitlyn howard
September 17, 2009 at 12:10 am

i tried this an it worked just as you said. i really hope apple gets around to fixing this one. thanks for the post!
Reply

jim
September 17, 2009 at 12:21 am

No problem. I’m glad to hear it worked for you too and wasn’t just some fluke that worked for me :-)
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John
October 1, 2009 at 6:22 pm

I’m having the same problem. The person that initiates the video chat will not be able to hear the other side. Also using Time Capsule on one end and Back To My Mac on both ends. BUMMER! 10.6.1 here.
Reply

Delven
October 14, 2009 at 12:04 pm

I have one for you… Do you know a fix for the iChat between one computer with Snow Leopard and one computer with Leopard. It seems that the only portion of iChat that will work between my parents laptop and my iMac is the text feature. No audio or video or sharing. We can both see Apple’s test user that Tech support gave us, but we cannot seem to be able to chat between us. Since then, we both installed GoogleTalk with video chat which works, so i doubt it’s any of our ISP’s.
Reply

jim
October 14, 2009 at 12:07 pm

@Delven:

Unfortunately, I have no idea of a fix for that :-( I’ve got Snow Leopard on everything here.
Reply

Eleanora Ray
December 6, 2009 at 6:45 pm

Hi just wondering if any one could suggest a good torrent downloader. Hopefully free but if reasonable and speedy with good storage I would consider a paid service.
Reply

jim
December 6, 2009 at 9:04 pm

@Eleanora Ray:

Check out Transmission: http://www.transmissionbt.com/

About the author

Jim Mock is a web developer living in Portland, Oregon with his wife, twin sons, 3 dogs, and 2 cats. He has been a Boston Red Sox fan for as long as he can remember, runs Three Dogs Media in his spare time, is addicted to video games and web standards, and thinks you should be, too.