Skype. It’s an indispensable tool for podcasters. Countless numbers of tip sheets and tutorials have been published over the years in an effort to help producers gain maximum control over it. But it can still be an unwieldy beast, despite our best efforts to tame it. And while Skype’s nature may be troublesome enough on its own, it’s generally understood that the software itself is trustworthy and that we can rely on it to perform adequately at a basic level. But that perception changed for many users of the Skype Mac client this week.

By default, Skype is set to automatically update itself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as these updates can provide overall improvements to the software. But having auto updates enabled allows the Skype development team to slide small changes into the application under the radar. Skype for OS X recently updated to version 7.8.388. This update brought a bug along with it that causes Skype to use the system default audio settings, regardless of how things are set in the Skype client itself.

If you’ve been hit by this bug, there’s a workaround that may get you thru until a future update corrects the problem. Simply go into your Mac’s System Preferences and open the Sound pane. From there, you can change the system settings to match whatever you’d prefer to use in Skype. Now, Skype will pass audio thru those sources. This solution may still cause some trouble for producers with complex setups that rely on the Skype and system audio I/O to be different. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to downgrade to the previous version of Skype.

I launched Skype last night to see if my version of the program had been updated. I was relieved to see that I was still using version 7.7.335. I went into my Skype preferences and unchecked the box next to “Always keep Skype up to date” at the bottom of the General tab (logging into the application was required to make this change).

Hopefully, the Skype team is on top of this issue and they’ll have it fixed in the next update. If you’ve had to deal with this problem, let us know how you’ve worked around it by leaving a comment below.