Stop the popping in (High) Sierra

[mattsday]

The various sorts of "antipop" are just tricking the OS so it keeps the audio system active. It was meant for real macs (mainly laptops) to stop the popping sound when they go to sleep.
You can also use it — as I do — to prevent ground loops if your computer is plugged into an audio amplifier.
The original antipop (https://www.tomsick.net/projects/antipop.html) support was stopped in 2009 as you can read.
I've been using it for years, with total satisfaction, but checking the link above, I've found there's a variant, lighter on the system.
I put the direct link here, in case tomsick.net would disappear someday: https://github.com/mttrb/antipopd

To our friends moderators: I've put this link in the 2 first treads I've found talking about antipop. I have no interest of any kind in that free software, except to share the silence it gives.

This is a nice daemon, however I wouldn't be too concerned either way. The plist in this thread runs a single copy of bash - the performance impact on a modern (or even 15-year old) machine would be so minimal as to be unnoticed. On my system a cursory look suggested it took around 520Kb RAM and virtually no CPU.

The main benefit this brings is having an option not to run when on battery power. You could modify the original script to do this as such:

while true; do if [ "$(pmset -g ac | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}')" != No ]; then say ' '; fi; sleep 25; done

TL;DR unless you're dead keen, using a laptop or need to absolutely max out resources I wouldn't take the effort to switch to this daemon if it's working fine for you already.

 

[Nodarkthings]

Quite right.
But what brought me to check that is indeed that I had com.apple.speech.speechsynthesisd eating 4 to 6 % CPU to no avail. Now it's at 0.2%.
On my i3 Sandy Bridge with El Capitan (for the time being), I tend to optimize any single wasted percent, if I can.

 

[mattsday]

Quite right.
But what brought me to check that is indeed that I had com.apple.speech.speechsynthesisd eating 4 to 6 % CPU to no avail. Now it's at 0.2%.
On my i3 Sandy Bridge with El Capitan (for the time being), I tend to optimize any single wasted percent, if I can.

4-6% CPU sounds extremely high, even on a single core - especially considering it should be idling for at least 10 seconds (and 25 seconds in this thread's example)

 

[Nodarkthings]

I should have said "peaking". It was not continuous but I've lost days before finding out it was due to Tomsick's antipop — I only recently switched to El Capitan and never noticed that behaviour in Mavericks.
We've discussed with other members about the performance differences between i3 and i7, especially on recent OSes, and yes they can be huge!
(Just considering ElCap's Mail.app on my i7 compared to my i3, both Sandy Bridge, is incredible... — believe you me, I've done every possible optimization)

 

[Quake3d]

Thanks...That really helped me..

 

[Drew5316]

This initially helped me—that popping was driving me bonker-balls!—but the audio was frequently gone after waking from sleep mode.

Per sashoosh's suggestion, I unloaded the script, and switched to AppleALC under Drivers-Audio via MultiBeast. It seems to be working fine, even after sleep.

Thanks to all who contributed to this thread!

 

[Nodarkthings]

Same for me! I switched to AppleALC last summer and got rid of antipop. It's working without issue.