PsychoPy3 & microphone problems on a Mac 10.15.4 computer

Hi everyone,

I’m in the process of designing an experiment, where a visual stimulus appears in different positions on a screen according to the acoustic properties of a vocalisation.

In order to get started on programming for the rest of the experiment, PsychoPy needs access to the microphone and to open a microphone stream; however, when I run even just a simple script, it returns the following ‘ApplePersistenceIgnoreState’ error:

First part of the returned error:

Second part of the returned error:

From what I gather by reading around online, using the microphone on a Mac computer in PsychoPy can produce difficulties. Following the advice of some colleagues, I have tried to run the script on PsychoPy2, but this didn’t solve the problem either. Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations for a workaround for this issue?

My specifications are as follows:
PsychoPy version: PsychoPy 2020.1.3
Mac version: 10.15.4

I’d appreciate any help you may have!!

Best,
Chris

The script I ran was just the following straightforward code:

*from psychopy import visual, sound, microphone *
win = visual.Window()
microphone.switchOn(sampleRate=44100)
*rec_duration = 10 *
sound.backend.get_input_devices()
filename = “my_recording.wav”
mic = microphone.AudioCapture()
mic.reset()
mic.setMarker(tone=1000, secs=0.25, volume=0.1)
mic.record(rec_duration, block=False, filename = filename)
mic.playMarker()
while mic.recorder.running:
if event.waitKeys(keyList=‘space’):
mic.stop()

It’s Catalina, I’m afraid. And pretty much every version of MacOS after High Sierra. Until there is an alternative microphone solution, there’s very little that can be done about it. See here: Pyo not found with catalina (mac)

Many thanks. Given all these problems, i think i will downgrade to HighSierra. Shouldn’t have installed these new version in the first place!
best

thibault

The hacky solution in Catalina is using install_name_tool.

first, need xcode or command-line tools installed via xcode-select,

than go to
/Applications/PsychoPy.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python3.6/pyo

and run below commands.
install_name_tool -change @loader_path/libportaudio.2.dylib @loader_path/…/…/…/…/Frameworks/libportaudio.2.dylib _pyo.cpython-36m-darwin.so