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Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

336 pointsby faebiover 1 year ago

40 comments

tmikaeldover 1 year ago
The left&#x2F;right channels drifting randomly is one thing (SoundSource fixes it), but it gets worse..<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to raise awareness of Apples horrible audio issues for quite a few years now. Driver re-starts and USB re-connects, for no apparent reason. [0][1]<p>I have the issue on Mac Mini (2018) Intel, Mac Studio M1, Macbook Pro M2, so it&#x27;s not device specific.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;thread&#x2F;132423" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;thread&#x2F;132423</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32163114">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32163114</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;search&#x2F;?q=Popping+Sound" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;search&#x2F;?q=Popping+Sound</a>
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goblin89over 1 year ago
I have been producing music on macOS for 8+ years on multiple laptops (from x86 to ARM), different external DACs, wired and wireless headphones, etc. I am very sensitive to L&#x2F;R balance and sometimes have to adjust the panning ever so slightly if my ears are off (e.g., after pressure change during a flight) in phone’s Accessibility settings.<p>The fact that there is an Apple-specific L&#x2F;R audio balance bug, which now seemingly everyone suffers from, is complete news to me. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a different reality…
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gokover 1 year ago
The common form of this bug is way older than 10 years and isn&#x27;t really specific to macOS.<p>The problem is that audio devices do not have an explicit concept of &quot;balance&quot;. It&#x27;s set by adjusting the level of each channel. That volume adjusting process is not reliable. It often happens over an unreliable interface where some volume adjustments are just dropped. This hits a second problem: the audio device often has the ability to adjust its levels out of band with the host audio stack. Thus your laptop has to periodically poll the device to find out what the current actual audio levels are. When your laptop sees that the volume per channel is not equal, it doesn&#x27;t know if this was caused by the device itself adjusting the balance or the volume adjustment message being ignored.<p>So for example:<p>1. User tells laptop to increase volume from 50% to 60%<p>2. Laptop tells device&#x27;s right channel to go to 60% (success)<p>3. Laptop tells device&#x27;s left channel to go to 60% (failure)<p>4. Laptop checks with audio device, sees 60% on right and 50% on left<p>5. Laptop changes audio balance to be nudged to the right<p>There are some ways to mitigate the problem. The audio stack could try to detect when its level commands are being dropped, but that risks the audio stack and device &quot;fighting&quot; over the correct volume. Better closer-to-realtime scheduling can reduce the risk of messages being dropped.
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ukuinaover 1 year ago
Does not surprise me.<p>I recently discovered that interrupting the close-all-apps-before-reboot workflow when applying a macOS upgrade (e.g., &quot;don&#x27;t terminate my terminal process yet, one sec, okay, I&#x27;m good to reboot now&quot;) requires a redo of the ENTIRE update process (including redownloading the 13GB update!)
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kpmccover 1 year ago
The fact that this has existed for so long and is common enough to warrant a third party program devoted to resolving the issue is an embarrassment for Apple.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;balance-lock&#x2F;id1019371109?mt=12?mt=12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;balance-lock&#x2F;id1019371109?mt=1...</a>
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ben7799over 1 year ago
I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen this or heard anyone talk about it. I&#x27;ve had at least one Mac since 2006 and all the engineering departments I&#x27;ve worked in since 2014 have been all Mac. Mostly at work I&#x27;m not doing much with audio, but at home I have had external DACs and equipment, I have a Scarlet interface, etc.. that I hook mics or guitars too from time to time, etc..<p>There are plenty of things I can complain about and I kind of think Mac OS is getting worse, but this one hasn&#x27;t hit me.
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anentropicover 1 year ago
I used to experience this all the time and had a 3rd party app installed to lock the balance to centre.<p>But it seems to have gone away in last couple of versions of macOS, have not had the &#x27;fixer&#x27; installed since I got an M1 and it hasn&#x27;t occurred again for me (so... Sonoma and the one before).<p>If I recall, the original reason for the bug was a stupid keyboard shortcut (helpfully mapped to &quot;f*** up my audio balance&quot;) that was easy to trigger by accident, with no visual feedback to know that you&#x27;d done it.<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s locale-specific, maybe some keyboard layouts or whatever still have it mapped.
ttfkamover 1 year ago
That&#x27;s nothing. Even though the hardware has supported it for at least <i>15 years</i>, MacOS still doesn&#x27;t have support for MST (DisplayPort daisy-chaining). Instead of just plugging one cable in and having two externals connected to each other, we&#x27;ve all either had to use a cable per monitor (using two scarce ports on the laptop) or buy a $100-$300 box that will do the work for us.<p>Back when installing Windows on a MacBook with Bootcamp was pretty common, it was galling to have Windows support MST perfectly fine on the Apple hardware while MacOS reverted to simple (useless) mirroring.
donatjover 1 year ago
It’s dumb that I have to run a resident program to fix this, but here we are - it fixes the problem. Otherwise every time I dock my laptop the audio is in some random balance.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tunabellysoftware.com&#x2F;balance_lock&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tunabellysoftware.com&#x2F;balance_lock&#x2F;</a>
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naveen_kover 1 year ago
If you use AssistiveTouch on your iPhone or iPad with a customized top-level menu, every iOS&#x2F;iPadOS update resets it to default settings. Apple hasn&#x27;t fixed it for over 8+ years either.
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izacusover 1 year ago
And I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;ll get better, with Sonoma I&#x27;m seeing more and more audio switching bugs and weird behaviours when I connect headphones.<p>At least this balance bug disappeared, although it was plagueing me on my previous MacBook.
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trilbyglensover 1 year ago
It&#x27;s almost like apple doesn&#x27;t actually care ;)
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peachpossumover 1 year ago
I used to own a 2014 VW GTI and would play my preferred audio from a USB&#x2F;Lightning connected iPod touch through its entertainment system. The audio system was flipping L&#x2F;R balance every few minutes, without any input from my end (volume adjustments, play&#x2F;pause, etc.). It drove me crazy. I always chalked this up to a quality issue with the VW entertainment system since I have never experienced this on any other playback system in my home or in my other cars.<p>I&#x27;ve heard the occasional random pop or click audio artifacts from my Mac mini home recording studio setup but never experienced the L&#x2F;R balance issue. And with the more recent macOS versions (Ventura and Sonoma) I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve heard any audio clicks or pops. I&#x27;m using an older Roland OctaCapture audio interface, but have tried the Focusrite Scarletts and some MOTU devices without incident.
j_4over 1 year ago
Hey, Windows has had a related-ish bug forever too!<p>Go to device properties and change L&#x2F;R balance to be unequal.<p>Turn sound down to 0.<p>Turn it back up and balance is equal again.
Sakosover 1 year ago
What&#x27;s the audio left&#x2F;right balance bug?
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rented_muleover 1 year ago
I&#x27;ve been happily using an app available for free on the App Store to work around it for years now:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;balance-lock&#x2F;id1019371109" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;balance-lock&#x2F;id1019371109</a>
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alex_dufover 1 year ago
This is much older than 10 years<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;79384&#x2F;audio-balance-changes-randomly-in-macbook-pro-retina-15-inch-mid-2012" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;79384&#x2F;audio-balanc...</a>
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P_I_Stakerover 1 year ago
For some reason they think basic features of apple music should never work. Guess I&#x27;m the problem, because this is unusable, yet I won&#x27;t cancel.<p>P.S. I&#x27;m specifically talking about certain playlist management features not working. Specifically, the &quot;add next&quot; simply has never worked well.<p>I think it&#x27;s only on PC, but they do something to make your playlists unusable, if they&#x27;re large. I think shuffle doesn&#x27;t work at all for my uses (perhaps for tiny playlists where shuffle barely matters)<p>Weirdly, most of this seems by design, although it&#x27;s not hard to see why. Apple doesn&#x27;t want shuffle to compete with their algorithm, but WTF did we end up with? Streaming services riddled with user hostile design.
Razenganover 1 year ago
Some longstanding bugs&#x2F;limitations in macOS&#x2F;iOS make me honestly wonder if any higher ups at Apple actually use their own products, or do they just have fleshbots (human assistants&#x2F;secretaries) do everything for them..
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MilaMover 1 year ago
I had a recent UPS from Eaton connected to my iMac with USB. Every couple of days, it would not wake up from sleep. The only remedy is to power-cycle. Not funny. I have the same UPS now connected to my Raspberry Pi 4, and it works without issues. Apple doesn&#x27;t care very much about third-party hardware, in my experience.
apiover 1 year ago
It seems like lots of very mature software projects have these bugs that just hang around forever. Someone could fix them. Someone should fix them. Nobody fixes them.<p>My own projects have a few so I am guilty.<p>Maybe they give the project “character.”
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lanthadeover 1 year ago
Apple audio issues are definitely nothing new. I recall as far back as the early 00’s problems with stereo separation on apple laptops. This was especially apparent when playing backing tracks out the headphone port where it was a mono tracks&#x2F;click pair. The click could be clearly heard on the tracks line which is a bad thing for the house mix. That particular problem was hardware though. If you used an external usb interface the problem went away.
serguzestover 1 year ago
I think this is a hostile policy of Apple not to bother implementing stable interoperation with non-apple hardware.<p>I have an LG monitor and a list of bugs I am experiencing in the macOS:<p>- No sound volume control<p>- No brightness control<p>- Nightshift doesn&#x27;t work on it<p>- Audio is unusable most of the time. When I try to play audio on the monitor, it is playing it at like 10x speed with a stuttering sound and if you try to watch a 20-minute video it finishes in like 2 minutes.
te_chrisover 1 year ago
I’ve just switched to using a big screen with laptop closed and a usb webcam. I’m now on my second webcam model (razer kiyo pro, after logi brio 500 was not good) and still people I call say my audio distorts after about 5 minutes. It’s so frustrating and seems to be a problem with Mac usb audio. I actually produce music too, but have a thunderbolt interface so that works better
radoover 1 year ago
Reminds me of my &quot;favourite&quot; macOS issue: alternative keyboard language input is carried over to the next app I switch to, or Spotlight. Almost 20 years of forcing me to switch back to the default language hundreds of times a day. Any idea if it can be fixed by an app? Thanks!
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exabrialover 1 year ago
Pssh. Fixing bugs gets in the way of &quot;innovation&quot; these days you un-innovative fool.
whywhywhywhyover 1 year ago
Man I remember having to deal with this multiple times a week, weirdly it stopped maybe from the 2015 MBP onwards for me never encountered it again and assumed it was fixed. But all my computers between the Titanium Powerbook and then had it.
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ongytenesover 1 year ago
A friend of mine told me he prefers Apple because &quot;it just works&quot;.<p>The only Apple I used never had this problem. But then again, the first thing I did with it was replace the OS with Linux. :-P
bichonnagesover 1 year ago
Is this a problem that exists only with headphones? I have the impression that the speakers on my brand-new Macbook Pro M3 tend to drift to the left, or at least not to be centered.
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fortran77over 1 year ago
It&#x27;s odd that most Apple users don&#x27;t care. And funny that Apple advocates claim that Apple is the high-quality audio choice when the stock hardware isn&#x27;t.
aaronbrethorstover 1 year ago
I first experienced this on a titanium G4 PowerBook in 2001 or 2002 on Mac OS X 10.1 or whatever the current version was then. The bug is probably as old as macOS.
olliejover 1 year ago
I find the general scheduling of high cpu tasks to be annoying - start enough compilation threads going and you get network stoppage :-&#x2F;
theultdevover 1 year ago
Never had this issue, but I do put the left audio to 90% since my wife&#x27;s handmedown left ear airpod is dying.<p>It evens it out fine. Will replace at 99%.
lloydatkinsonover 1 year ago
But the audio&#x2F;music people out there breathlessly tell everyone mac is the best for audio work?
gexahaover 1 year ago
Wow, I always thought that it could be just my personal hearing issues, never could properly google the issue
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knodiover 1 year ago
Shocker!! MacOS seems to have turned into a red-headed stepchild for Apple.
anon22981over 1 year ago
I’m not sure if a bug or a feature, but on two different iphones I’ve had the issue where the volume suddenly aggressively goes up or down without me pressing the volume button. Has happened at least in netflix and youtube. Always when I’m actively using the phone.<p>Might an ill fitted case or something, but those phones had different cases.<p>Anyone know if this is some bug or am I being dumb?
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musicaleover 1 year ago
So it&#x27;s not just me. Good to know.
pdimitarover 1 year ago
Long ranty post.<p>I&#x27;ll use the occasion to crap on macOS because yes, I experienced this, not to mention random devices disconnecting in conditions of higher memory pressure (i.e. starting a k8s cluster and doing tests, then tearing it down, then starting another etc.) -- one time even my keyboard disconnected which was annoying to say the least.<p>To this day my $300 dock sometimes doesn&#x27;t at all get detected after I wake up my iMac Pro. A $8000 machine and an OS developed by trillion+ $ dollar company cannot properly wake up all devices after sleep. Yep. :|<p>I appreciate macOS as a system for users where SIP et. al. prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot -- Apple has mostly solved the problem of careless users clicking on stuff they really shouldn&#x27;t. (Excluding phishing.)<p>But as a programmer, I am now on a course to gradually and eventually move back to Linux. Why?<p>- Everything is just faster. A Manjaro XFCE with the latest kernel (6.7 as of 2024-FEB-14) just makes everything <i>fly</i> on my AMD 5500U laptop. Telegram starts in 0.5s while my iMac Pro needs at least 5 seconds. Firefox with all its addons boots up in about 1.5s. I know all of the lag and delays are related to security scanning but it does get tiring after several years. As a programmer I want to say &quot;everything in these directories is trusted, I&#x27;ll suffer if I am wrong, now leave me alone&quot; which of course I can&#x27;t do.<p>- Related to the above: Intel Macs are likely unofficially now second-class citizens and frak all of us who invested in them, right? The iMac Pro costed me $8000 and I&#x27;ll use it until it blows up in my face, that&#x27;s non-negotiable for a $8000 machine. So I&#x27;d think whatever performance gains or optimizations are being done for macOS, the Intel architecture is probably a <i>persona non grata</i> already.<p>- Just lately Erlang&#x27;s team fixed an absurd issue where due to JIT using memory mapping macOS literally shows me a popup while I am coding! Save an Elixir file in my NeoVim (which invokes the LS) and whoops, there, you have a micro popup that disappears after ~0.2s. And it can be a problem if you cancel it (has an X button inside which I assume is focused by default) but seriously, just working in your editor leads to micro popups that disappear fractions of a second later... WTF. And their fix? They moved to use another memory mapping API. Which is a workaround in fact, not a fix. I feel for them so hard.<p>- A lot of goodies are hidden behind paid software which is 100% fine by me (obviously we all want to be paid for our work) but it does send a signal that Apple doesn&#x27;t care much -- iStat Menus is a good example and SoundSource is probably the best example (and strongly related to the original article); why do we need SoundSource at all? Why is this not handled by the OS? And again on the money issue, as much as I want to support other programmers, it starts feeling like you are being nickel-and-dimed as time passes by.<p>Honestly, after using macOS full time for about 4.5 years, I am not impressed. I like the displays <i>a lot</i> and I know I would miss them dearly and my eyes will be unhappy which is basically my main reason for sticking with macOS for a workstation (well that plus the $8000 investment I made 4.5 years ago which let&#x27;s be honest, has paid for itself already, many times over).<p>Another thing I do like is the menu bar and I&#x27;ll duplicate that functionality on my XFCE laptop soon enough, so not much of a loss.<p>I believe at one point I&#x27;ll just start ssh-ing into my AMD 5500U laptop so I can reap the benefits of the amazing iMac Pro display while still having Linux&#x27;s benefits on my side. And I didn&#x27;t even mention how much I can tinker with it e.g. I wanted to experiment with various ZFS and bcachefs setups and of course I couldn&#x27;t do that without a VM... did I mention I never found a truly good VM manager for macOS?<p>But that tinker-ability is just the tip of the iceberg and this comment became huge enough already.<p>If you have gotten this far -- any ideas how to properly secure an XFCE environment? I&#x27;ll need to install Chrome and Zoom at one point but I don&#x27;t trust their creators to not pwn my system the moment I run the installer and as we know X11 is not at all secure; likely both softwares will record each of my keystrokes and upload them somewhere. So, anybody knows how to properly isolate a desktop program on XFCE? And if that&#x27;s not possible on XFCE I am open to migrate to whatever other DE allows it.<p>Thanks for reading.
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yungporkoover 1 year ago
as a long term apple user, their blatant disregard for fixing bugs is really starting to piss me off to the point where next time i upgrade my phone and computer, i&#x27;m probably going back to android&#x2F;linux. their software is literally a microsoft-tier experience (maybe even worse at this point) across the board now, and i&#x27;m not going to keep paying a premium for non-premium bullshit full of stupid bugs any junior dev could figure out.<p>these are just the bugs i can think of <i>off the top of my head</i> which have existed for literal years:<p>- on iphone, the haptic and sound feedback from tapping letters on the keyboard has a noticeable lag to it half the time.<p>- on iphone, the volume of all system sounds shoots up to 100% without warning, even if you&#x27;re wearing headphones. this bug also reverses the volume level, so you have to turn the volume up to make it go down.<p>- on iphone, browser tabs just get stuck displaying one page (or sometimes nothing at all) no matter how many times to try to navigate or refresh, and you have to either kill safari and restart it or close the tab and open a new one.<p>- on mac laptops, the battery drains while sleeping at a rate of about 20% per day. i&#x27;ve been a mac user since 2015 but only since i got an m1 max macbook pro, nearly every time i open the lid, it&#x27;s dead.<p>- on mac, sometimes external storage just doesnt show up at all, restarting doesn&#x27;t work, waiting doesn&#x27;t work, you literally just have to try again tomorrow and hope for the best.<p>- on apple music (any platform), music will just stop and it will tell you that another device is trying to play music when it isn&#x27;t. sometimes this doesnt happen for weeks, sometimes it happens 4 times in a single song and goes on for hours so you have to just stop trying to listen to music.<p>- on any platform with siri, it will just reset to the default voice&#x2F;accent regularly, making all the other options useless.<p>- on any platform with siri, you ask it to remind you about something in x minutes or at x time, siri confirms that it will, then 1&#x2F;10 times it just... doesn&#x27;t.<p>- on apple tv, you randomly lose the ability to navigate left inside whatever app you&#x27;re in, so you have to kill it and restart it.<p>- on apple tv, the picture just freezes but the audio continues. you have to just turn it off and on again. happens every 2-3 days.<p>- on apple tv, about half the time, the native voice search forces you to repeat your search 3 times. you tell it what to search for, it shows up for a split second, then clears. you have to do it three times. this one alone is worth ditching apple over. if i ever find out who introduced this bug and cross paths with them, i <i>will</i> physically attack them on sight.<p>i actually can even think of more bugs, but i&#x27;m bored of typing.
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