Tiny app preventing unwanted noise on macOS, Linux and *BSD with receivers & amplifiers.
I've noticed that macOS seems to disable its audio subsystem after roughly 15 seconds of no playback, in order to save energy. This seems great, right? The problem is, some audio receivers and amplifiers will emit horrible static noise that is very unpleasant to listen to assuming that there is no input.
This hack solves this by continuisely playing an empty audio file. There should not be any noticeable quality loss or anything along those lines, because all this script does is run an empty WAV file.
Tested on macOS 15.0 Sequoia, it works perfectly. It should work on any macOS version that provides the command-line utility afplay. There are also no dependencies, and it doesn't show up in macOS' media controls. Great!
It also works on Arch Linux. For some reason that I don't know, Gentoo doesn't seem to need it.
For macOS, use the .app. Move it to /Applications and enable it as a login item.
For Linux and BSD, use the .sh script. Move it wherever you like and add it to .zprofile or .bashrc.
For Windows, there is as far as I can tell no real need for this.
This is just a script, there is no source code to speak of.
MIT license