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The following is an applescript that I use to change audio output devices:

tell application "System Preferences" activate set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.sound" end tell tell application "System Events" tell application process "System Preferences" tell tab group 1 of window "Sound" click radio button "Output" if (selected of row 2 of table 1 of scroll area 1) then set selected of row 1 of table 1 of scroll area 1 to true set deviceselected to "Headphones" else set selected of row 2 of table 1 of scroll area 1 to true set deviceselected to "MX279" end if end tell end tell end tell tell application "System Preferences" to quit

It worked on Yosemite, but when I updated to El Capitan it is giving me the following error:

"System Events got an error: Can't get tab group 1 of window \"Sound\" of application process \"System Preferences\". Invalid index"

I'm pretty unfamiliar with applescript, so any ideas why this might be happening will be much appreciated.

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In the first part of your script you load the Sound preference pane. It can happen that the pane isn't fully loaded before you send commands to it in the second part of the script. The error says that the tab group 1 (the one that contains the Output tab) doesn't exist at the moment you are trying to access it.

To make sure the tab group 1 exists, we can wait for it with these two lines:

repeat until exists tab group 1 of window "Sound" end repeat

The full script:

tell application "System Preferences" activate set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.sound" end tell tell application "System Events" tell application process "System Preferences" repeat until exists tab group 1 of window "Sound" end repeat tell tab group 1 of window "Sound" click radio button "Output" if (selected of row 2 of table 1 of scroll area 1) then set selected of row 1 of table 1 of scroll area 1 to true set deviceselected to "Headphones" else set selected of row 2 of table 1 of scroll area 1 to true set deviceselected to "MX278" end if end tell end tell end tell tell application "System Preferences" to quit
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  • That makes sense, thanks! Do you know why this was working for about 9 months prior and only now started acting up? System lag from El Capitan, maybe? Commented Oct 6, 2015 at 20:32
  • Good question. To be honest, I don't know. Commented Oct 6, 2015 at 22:14
  • Might you have any input for this question? apple.stackexchange.com/questions/217148/… Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 21:29
  • If you use "window 1" instead of "window 'sound' to refer to the window, it will also word on systems which run a non english system. Commented Dec 16, 2015 at 15:30

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