You opened Audiout and an alert said some of its saved settings couldn’t be read. Here’s what happened and what, if anything, you lost.
What happened
Audiout keeps its saved settings in separate files, one per kind of setting: your scenes, your per-app routes, sync trims, equalizer settings, speaker icons, the list of excluded apps, and the speaker list (the speakers Audiout remembers and each one’s Show in Mixer setting).
On launch, Audiout reads each file. If one of them is damaged and can’t be read (a crash mid-write, a full disk, and file-sync tools are the usual suspects), Audiout doesn’t guess at its contents and doesn’t throw everything away. It quarantines that one file, resets just that store to its defaults, and shows you the alert. The alert names the file it quarantined.
The same alert appears if you go back to an older version of Audiout after a newer one has saved its settings. The older version can’t read the newer file, so it sets that file aside instead of overwriting it.
What you did not lose
Everything the alert didn’t name. The files are independent, so a damaged scenes file, for example, touches nothing else: your app routes, sync trims, equalizer, icons, and excluded apps are all still exactly as you left them. Your license is stored separately and is never part of this. Saved AirPlay passwords and codes live in the macOS Keychain, so this never resets them either.
The damaged file isn’t deleted either. It’s set aside, so nothing is silently discarded.
What you’ll need to redo
Only the store the alert named, and only if you had changed it from the defaults:
- Scenes: recreate your saved scenes in the Scenes tab.
- App routes: send each app back to the speaker you had it on.
- Sync trims: redo any timing adjustments you had dialed in per speaker.
- Equalizer: set your EQ curves again.
- Icons: reassign any custom speaker icons.
- Excluded apps: rebuild the list of apps Audiout should leave alone.
- Speaker list: set Show in Mixer again for any speaker you had hidden or set to “Always” (see Hide or show a speaker in the Mixer).
If you never customized that store, there’s nothing to redo: the defaults it reset to are the same defaults you were using.
If it keeps happening
One reset after a crash or a force-shutdown is normal and not worth chasing. The same alert on every launch is not. Two things to check:
- Free disk space. macOS can fail writes quietly when the disk is nearly full.
- Whether Audiout’s settings folder is inside something a sync tool manages. Files being synced while Audiout writes them is a reliable way to corrupt them.
If neither applies and the alert keeps coming back, write to support@audiout.app and tell us which store it names each time. The quarantined file can help us find the bug, so mention it in your message.
For anything else, the rest of the support articles are here, or contact us directly.