antipopd

Copyright (c) Matthew Robinson 2010, 2018

Email: matt@blendedcocoa.com

antipopd is a drop in replacement for Robert Tomsick's antipopd 1.0.2 bash script which is available at http://www.tomsick.net/projects/antipop.html

antipopd is a utility program which keeps the audio system active to stop the popping sound that can occur when OS X puts the audio system to sleep. This is achieved by using the Speech Synthesizer system to speak a space, which results in no audio output but keeps the audio system awake.

The benefit of this compiled version over the bash script is a reduction in resource overheads. The bash script executes two expensive processes (pmset and say) every ten seconds (one process if ac_only is set to 0).

This version of antipopd is released, like Robert Tomsick's version, under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike License 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us

Build

antipopd can be built in a terminal using the following command:

clang -framework AppKit -framework IOKit -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -o antipopd antipopd.m

A built version (i386 and x86_64) of antipopd is included in the repository.

Configuration

By default antipopd will run every ten seconds to keep the audio system running. If you would like antipopd to only speak when the computer is connected to a power source you can create a configuration file at /usr/local/share/antipop/ac_only.

If the first byte of the configuration file is a 1 the audio system will only be kept alive when on AC power.

The configuration file is only read once when antipopd launches. Changing the configuration file will not take effect until antipopd is restarted.

Installation

In order to have antipopd run as a daemon (run automatically) it is necessary to configure launchctl. In Terminal run the following commands:

sudo cp com.blendedcocoa.antipopd.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo cp antipopd /usr/local/bin
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.blendedcocoa.antipopd.plist

You will need to provide your password to allow the installation.