Identified request for English Reddit post minus AI-typical punctuationIdentified request for English Reddit post minus AI-typical punctuationElgato Wave Link is preventing your Mac from sleeping and draining your battery overnight

If you've been waking up to a warm MacBook with a mysteriously drained battery, and you own an Elgato Wave XLR or any Wave Link device, this might be your culprit.

I spent some time digging into my pmset logs and found that coreaudiod was holding a PreventUserIdleSystemSleep assertion literally all night long. The Mac never entered deep sleep. Not once.

The root cause: Wave Link installs a virtual audio driver called WaveLink3VirtualAudio.driver that runs independently of whether your physical microphone is plugged in or not. So even if you unplug the mic before bed, the virtual device stays alive, coreaudiod keeps an audio session open for it, and macOS refuses to sleep properly because it thinks audio is still active.

You can verify this yourself:

pmset -g assertions | grep coreaudiod

If you see UUIDs with preventuseridlesleep in there while Wave Link is running, you're affected.

The fix is simple: quit Wave Link before closing your laptop. Or remove it from your Login Items so it doesn't autostart. The physical mic will still work fine through the system audio stack, you just won't have access to the Wave Link mixer until you launch it manually.

Took me way too long to figure this out. Hope it saves someone else a few cycles of "why is my battery dead every morning."

Hopefully this can be fixed soon, otherwise I have to look for alternatives.