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

The left/right channels drifting randomly is one thing (SoundSource fixes it), but it gets worse..

I'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]

I have the issue on Mac Mini (2018) Intel, Mac Studio M1, Macbook Pro M2, so it's not device specific.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/132423

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163114

[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums/search/?q=Popping+Sound

I have just reported a bug where high memory pressure could cause memory pages from the real-time audio thread to get swapped out, causing audio glitches. I am not hopeful for a timely resolution now...

I have this using Firefox on a 2019 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM.

If the laptop has not been restarted for a while, Firefox tabs will eat up more and more memory over time until it makes the mac kind-of unresponsive (*) and will need to get hard power cycled.

The only signs that this is about to happen are two:

1. Any audio-emitting webapp will start to get very choppy, whether is youtube on FF, Google meet on chrome, or a slack call/huddle. Which is the problem I think you are referring to.

2. Switching workspaces animation will get very very choppy. Usually when this happens it's already almost too late.

(*) this means that while the pointer is still moving smoothily, even from a BT mouse, there is no reaction to any click or keyboard typing.

This seems unusual for such a serious memory leak to be present. Do you have any addons/plugins in Firefox? One of them may be the cause of the leak.

Uptime, 456 days 12 hours 8 minutes and 42 seconds. Firefox, 668 tabs. Countless other background tasks. Why doesn't my audio work!?!

That… is not a good idea. You should patch your OS.

That's not the original commenter. It's just someone being humorous.

Oh - sorry! I completely missed that. Will teach me for reading the comments at 7AM!

I see the same with firefox on my FreeBSD daily driver machine.

I thought it was because I pause the entire firefox process when the screen is locked. When it resumes it sometimes acts up (I use the STOP and CONT signals for this). But maybe it's just a FF bug.

I just restart it once every few days, my OS doesn't actually become unstable due to it. But i do have 64 GB of ram (one of the benefits to no longer being tied to apple's ecosystem is that memory upgrades and amazingly cheap)

I have the exact same issue, it starts to be choppy at random time and I have to reboot, usually in the middle of my work. I'm considering switching to another OS because of this single issue that has been there for years.

This is not fixable. You’d need an RTOS.

(You can’t mlock every single code page possibly executed by the thread for instance.)

How much memory could a single system thread handling the audio use? Forgive my ignorance I don't deeply understand OS level memory management but I thought, much like the task scheduler has priority understanding for CPU resource management, the memory manager had an idea of "these pages are important find some other page to evict".

About 25 megabytes for an approximately 10-second buffer.

I believe 96KHz/24bit is the highest quality audio supported natively on the MacBook Pro.

24 bits * 96KHz * 2 channels * 4x safety factor = 2.3 Megabytes per second.

How much memory could a single system thread handling the audio use?

It's not "use" but "ever potentially access", so it's unbounded unless they were careful. (Audio playback to speakers itself is bounded, but mixing isn't, and wireless headphones get complicated.)

Forgive my ignorance I don't deeply understand OS level memory management but I thought, much like the task scheduler has priority understanding for CPU resource management, the memory manager had an idea of "these pages are important find some other page to evict".

It's difficult to know what the most important pages in memory are, because you'd have to observe every single memory access, and that's not worth the overhead.

Basically there's two ways it uses:

1. a program can tell the OS to keep something in memory (either by hinting it or forcing it, called mlock or wiring).

2. every so often, the OS will disconnect some pages such that accessing them faults (called "moving to the inactive queue"). If there's a fault, it know it's being used and moves it to active again. Eventually, if there aren't any for long enough, it gets to the end of the inactive queue and is paged out.

Why wouldn't it be possible to mlock all the memory pages used by the real-time thread?

I do my best to do it on the application side. It would be nice if Apple's CoreAudio did the same.

If you mean that it is difficult to identify the pages used, that is true, but I found a great way to do just that. I keep track of all the pages I mlock(), list all the remaining pages, and mprotect them to crash if I accidentally access memory that was not mlocked. That helped me identify a couple of pages I forgot, such as the one that contains the __stack_chk_guard

And regarding the code pages, for some reason I get a permission denied error if I try to mlock them. Not sure why.

There is no mlockall() on macOS, but if there was one, I could delegate the real-time audio handling code to a separate executable, and call mlockall(). I would be guaranteed all the pages used by the real-time thread would be mlocked.

And by the way if you are interested in the report I sent to Apple, you can find all the details with the sample code to reproduce the problem there:

https://twistedwave.com/AudioGlitches.zip

this is the fault of a poorly designed application and not the OS

Here is the contents of the bug I have reported with all the details and sample code to reproduce the problem:

https://twistedwave.com/AudioGlitches.zip

It contains a program where the only thing I do in the real-time callback is to count the glitches, and I made sure to mlock() the memory used by the glitch counting code. When the memory pressure increases, it glitches.

The point is to avoid the memory pressure from increasing. Have you investigated the allocation behaviour of ALL the code in your application?

The memory pressure is caused by other apps on the user's machine. My test program just increments a counter when there is a glitch, and requires a trivial amount of memory. Yet, it can see glitches when other apps run in the background allocating memory.

I have just reported a bug where high memory pressure could cause memory pages from the real-time audio thread to get swapped out, causing audio glitches.

By any chance, is that problem related to the new Microsoft Teams and its incoming-call notification sound? Ever since the Sonoma update and the coinciding Teams switch it's glitching horribly.

Not for me. I have this problem and I have never used (or even installed) Teams.

the new Microsoft Teams and its incoming-call notification sound

I absolutely have this issue and would love to know more about any suspected causes.

Yup. I have found a strong correlation between memory pressure and audio glitches with my external dac. I filed a bug on this over two years ago and it has gotten no traction, but it sounds like you debugged it a bit more deeply than I did, so maybe yours will get noticed.

There might be something to it, higher than > 60% memory pressure and the issue will get a lot worse and more frequent.

I use an external DAC and encounter this crackling problem regularly. I have to unplug/replug my DAC to get it to go back to normal. I just thought it was a hardware problem with my DAC because it’s getting up there in the years, thought the caps might be going. Hmm…

I have 4 external all different sound cards and AMPs (USB), it's the same on all of them.

There is no software remedy, only re-connecting physically works (temporarily)

Well dang. I have had intention on buying a new DAC largely due to the issue; for better or worse there goes that plan.

I also didn't realize that this problem was common, but I switched to using an optical toslink cable to an external DAC which seems to have fixed it for me. Although now the system volume control doesn't work, but I can work around that with the volume control on my amp.

soundsource gives you the feature to control an external dac with the system volume. I bought it specifically for this use case.

I haven't tried Apple "certified" Thunderbolt devices yet, but others in the huge Apple thread [0] has and still experience cracks/pops.

“Amp” isn't an acronym

This is not a perfect solution, but if it's possible - see if the apps in question have an option for 'exclusive control' over the audio device.

If they do, then the app in question will pass the audio raw to the external device without the OS or any existing mixers interfering at all.

Of course, no other audio will play - only that from the app with exclusive control. It's not perfect but it can help in these scenarios.

I wonder if the clock source is getting out of whack with the DACs, it could be caused by extreme jitter.

Had crackling with slowdowns and kernel panics on M1.

Was fixed with a motherboard swap

Sometimes happens on Windows and Linux, too. Could be a bug in the XMOS SDK, seeing how almost all audio interfaces use it.

I had an external audio interface with occasional horrible bursts of white noise. I assumed it was the CPU not being fast enough, because there was a correlation between work and the bursts… but in the end it was a power supply that wasn’t powerful enough for all my hardware (although everything worked). I changed it, and the issue went away.

TIL! So far I'd been thinking that it was maybe an issue with my headphones (Bose QC45, connecting to the MBA M1)

I've been using Macs for audio work since 2007 and never experienced these issues. Currently using a Motu M4 but I've used probably a dozen audio interfaces plus the built-in ones.

Could this be an electrical issue?

Are you bus powering your interfaces?

Oh god, I thought my display was the problem, but it's the laptop! I'm so angry that Apple is to blame.

And get ready for macOS 14.4 where apparently Apple's decided that we're no longer allowed to kickstart coreaudiod (or any other LaunchDaemons)

    $ sudo launchctl kickstart -kp system/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod
    Could not kickstart service "com.apple.audio.coreaudiod": 1: Operation not permitted

I had crackling in my M1 MBP headphone jack, any variety of plugged in, USB/DAC all summer/early fall. I assumed it was an audio controller issue. And then it kind of dissipated, until there was a warm day in October. I had just watered the plant on my desk. All winter -- not an issue. House is cool and dry, but as soon as the humidity gets above 60% or so, I get crackling. Not sure what I'm going to do this summer.

I've definitely had the crackling on my M1 Ventura.

Also I use an old AudioBox USB and it sometimes dies and needs the unplug/replug.

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.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balance-lock/id1019371109?mt=1...

There are so many bugs and even more poor ergonomic choices that have been unfixed for years on Apple Devices. It's fascinating considering the whole cult regarding the company's so called attention to details.

It’s because despite those issues, depressingly macOS still delivers an experience that to most Mac users is preferable over that of Linux or especially Windows. Increasingly it’s not that macOS is incredible, but that the alternatives are that much worse.

And I say this as someone who uses Windows and Linux daily alongside macOS. Windows isn’t going to get any better so long as Microsoft’s betting on pushing services on users to make money and while desktop Linux is better than ever it still has a ways to go to make it unquestionably better across the board for more than a small subset of users.

It’s actually quite similar to why people buy MacBooks. Generic PC laptops nearly all involve one or more major tradeoffs in day to day use, with none being as good all-rounders as MacBooks even if individual specs don’t measure up.

Apart from MS's obsessive Bing pushing, I'd say Windows is easily better than macOS. Explorer beats Finder, PWA/Chrome profile support is nicer, window manager is better, archives are handled natively, touchpad gestures for eg. virtual desktops on small laptops are competitive. With a normal mouse, middle click for eg. hold to drag just isn't supported. The natural scroll settings for mouse and trackpad are bound, when you'd usually want them to be the opposite of each other.

As far as I know, iCloud is less well-featured than OneDrive.

As a recent MBA owner, the only thing I think Apple nails is hardware. The battery life and low power use are amazing and there's something to be said for Apple's ability to force-move devs to ARM.

The rest, not really. The OS is aggressively mid, as the kids would say.

...okay. Apple still makes native apps. That counts for something.

A lot of that is subjective. For me for example, Explorer vs. Finder is mostly a wash with Finder edging out Explorer in a few ways (e.g. toggling hidden file visibility with the key shortcut ⌘⇧. instead of having to dive into settings), and Windows window management is grating to the point that I have to keep a hard low limit on the number of programs open to get anything done under it. Archives are handled natively on macOS too, and I install 7zip on Windows anyway because its multithreaded compression/decompression is way faster than stock. Cloud storage is moot because I barely use it.

How do you manage your windows on macOS?

Most of the time, I don’t. It sounds silly but macOS window management works best when you don’t micromanage and just let windows pile up at whichever size fits their content, kind of like papers on a desk. Instead I group windows by virtual desktop (space) on two monitors, switching out virtual desktops to mix and match sets of windows. Individual windows are rarely moved or resized.

On the odd occasion I need tiling (which isn’t often) I use Moom[0] because it’s extremely non-intrusive (no easily accidentally triggered animations like Aero Snap) and lets you specify to leave a gap of a few pixels between windows and screen edges which looks nice.

[0]: https://manytricks.com/moom/

Yeah, I've mostly ended up using a bunch of virtual desktops on the Mac too, and it's nice and convenient. Thing is, though, once I got into that habit on the Mac (because everything I was used to sucked ass), I tried it on Windows and it works just as well. It's less that you can't get a nice windowing setup on macOS, more that the competition offers the same, and more (esp. in KDE 6's case, much, much more)

The problem with Windows is that it’s just lacking enough in a few areas to drive me crazy.

Its virtual desktops aren’t independent between monitors for example, so when you switch desktops on one monitor it switches on all monitors, which means you can’t mix and match window sets between monitors like is possible on macOS.

Windows’ window-centric nature also gets on my nerves. The only place you’ll see any notion of application-based window grouping is the taskbar, which is desktop-bounded, and so you can’t for example gather all windows for a program from across desktops into one desktop or close all windows across desktops unless the program’s developer has added that functionality themselves. You also can’t move groups of windows between desktops quickly.

Linux doesn’t have the desktop-based issues at least primarily because it’s had virtual desktops for decades, so the feature has been mature there for a long time, but DEs there are still overwhelmingly modeled after a Win9X paradigm and often also lack app-based grouping, even as a toggle.

Rectangle.app of course! The native window management features in MacOS are Windows XP-level-crappy.

Windows supports just about every archive format natively now too, thanks to libarchive integration.

MacOS and Windows are, in my honest opinion, significantly less consistent experiences than Gnome. The list I have on MacOS UX annoyances, design inconsistencies and implementation bugs is in the hundreds.

GNOME is very consistent, but the downside is that it’s not great in terms of power user features and progressive disclosure thereof. In some ways it’s also more mobile-inclined, it’s basically what one would get if they took iPadOS and applied some adaptations for desktop usage.

Some of that consistency is also undone when it’s necessary to run Electron or Qt apps. Anki for example is a real pain if you’re using fractional scaling under Wayland, because GNOME’s refusal to implement server side decorations forces Anki to run with an ugly generic titlebar and no shadow. macOS is better here, with all programs getting the system default window treatment unless they request otherwise.

In my experience, people tend to say that macOS "looks good". I have not spoken with a mac user who said that macOS is more usable or the workflows are more productive. Also, Apple has convinced everyone that they always know what they are doing, so when something is wrong in the OS it's users who think they must be doing something wrong.

But with Microsoft turning Windows into a big advertising billboard, I can see it becoming a valid reason.

Mac is more useable and productive than windows. The comes from someone who’s worked in both. And games on windows.

I was an original Mac user (first computer ever bought) and was thinking this type of stuff too. My Windows experience was from schools, friends' computers or later client's computers.

Nowadays I had both but use a Windows PC quite a lot (was destined to be a hackintosh, but couldn't put up with the hassle later one) and the reason I use Windows more is precisely because I have found it to be more stable, less annoying and with less bugs usually.

I have a loaded Intel Mac Mini along and the audio bugs keeps happening on this system, I have particularly nasty crackling that is impossible to debug and particularly annoying for a machine of this price (and I can't swap the mobo like I could if it were a PC).

The Apple reputation is largely underserved nowadays and I find it frustrating because it is one of the reasons they use to justify their absurdly high pricing.

Considering those bugs are still not fixed in Apple Silicon Mac's, I am pretty sure this is a combination of bad software maintenance and poor hardware design, even though they pretend they know better.

Considering the price of their computers, it is unacceptable but to be honest it won't be my problem anymore because I'm not buying anything else from Apple for the foreseeable future.

MacOS is nice and had some cool stuff back in the days, but now Windows can offer an almost 1to1 alternative, at a much better price with much less hardware issues. If you put as much money into a PC than you do in a Mac, the warranty will outlast the Apple support for the equivalent Mac which is kind of funny considering the prices...

Generic PC laptops nearly all involve one or more major tradeoffs in day to day use, with none being as good all-rounders as MacBooks even if individual specs don’t measure up.

This also applies to smartphones. No matter the aspect, some specialty Android is 10x as good as your iPhone. However, it'll have bizarre drawbacks. iPhones are popular because they have right default balance for the broad audience out of the box.

That "cult" and "attention to details" was a long time ago, when Steve Jobs was CEO. But even then there were many bugs, like the .DS_Store files, which never got fixed. It got much worse when Tim Cook took over. Now I only use macOS because the next best thing is still worse, and also the Mac hardware became really good with the switch to ARM (after a long long dark time with x86 where the hardware got worse and worse with each iteration).

I wish .DS_Store files were automatically gitignored...

(though why should git fix such a stupid problem it didn't create...)

Pretty easy with a global gitignore

it's not my computer that produces these files... but yes, perhaps MacOS should ship with .DS_Store in a global gitignore by default (though I don't even know if it ships with git at all...)

It does not (unless you install XCode developer tools)

Attention to detail, but only when they can market/advertise it, perhaps?

Apple is quite fine with their OS being an embarassment that needs 3rd party apps to fix, people will still hail it as the best thing ever.

For example, window management on macOS is trash, and the shortcuts are command+arrows which is fine if you have both hands on the keyboard. Not so much when you have a separate mouse. The OS is built expecting you are on a laptop or using a trackpad of some kind.

Yes, my solution was to throw more money at apple and get the "Magic" Trackpad. Just so i can use it alongisde my mouse for swipe gestures....

Apple problems get solved by buying more Apple products, working as intended :)

Apple isn't 'embarrassed' by bugs at all - only if those bugs result in widespread public attention.

Filing 100s of extremely detailed bug reports on their 'feedback assistant' will do less to change anything than one trending twitter post or news coverage.

Making bug reports extremely detailed doesn’t actually help; you don’t know which details are relevant and it could get it sent down the wrong paths from other people getting distracted by them.

Plus it gives you burnout. Rely on the system logs to have enough detail.

See also recent thread on menu items hiding behind camera notch... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343919

'Just works'!

What's the audio left/right balance bug?

The audio balance on Apple computers changes randomly, and has done so for at least a decade.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79384/audio-balanc...

Following the link, and a few more, describes at as changing "when volume buttons are pressed during high CPU load". That is perhaps random-seeming, but also way different from actually being reandom.

I have never used a (modern) Mac long enough to listen to audio, so I have no experience with this I just thought it sounded odd.

Now having learned that, I really (really) wonder how such a bug can happen, and how it can stay ignored for so long by the always-ranted-about masters of vertically integrated luxury computers. More the former, though.

It sounds almost as if there already is software somewhere that is doing something to maintain the proper balance (perhaps due to bugs in the hardware), and then that something becomes CPU-starved and/or interrupted when the volume changes, and doesn't resume properly. This is a wild guess straight outta ... Hampton, I have no clue about Mac hardware or macOS internals. Fun to think about, though!

I hope they fix it for real, soon!

Now having learned that, I really (really) wonder how such a bug can happen, and how it can stay ignored for so long by the always-ranted-about masters of vertically integrated luxury computers. More the former, though.

My first guess was that "volume up" is actually "increase volume on left channel" and "increase volume on right channel"

And when there's high CPU load, one of those commands gets lost or ignored for some reason.

And they can't synchronize this?

Normally the solution to this is to have a pair of parameters, pan and gain and compute the discrete channel gains from those two parameters. That way there's no synchronization and you can handle changes to those parameters independently.

It sounds like they have inverted the relationship between what is displayed to the users and what is used by the machine.

That's an even simpler (=better, often) theory! Thanks!

There are worse bugs that happen under high CPU load - I reported that you can interact with applications behind the hibernate Lock Screen… 9 years ago. You still can.

Yep, I’ve very much discovered and confirmed this behaviour independently, I was so shocked to learn that it was a known issue.

I know it’s silly but it helped me with imposter syndrome to see such a major OS that prides itself on seamless “it just works” experiences tolerate bugs like this.

That and the fact if you airplay a movie to Apple TV it thinks you want it to cast over the top of it with random advert videos in your web browser, so you can’t watch and browse.

We’re all human I guess ;)

But a lot of those bugs are basic functionalities, it is just that they are not the path Apple wants you to take.

For years now, and across iphone models and iOS versions, my iphone randomizes the artwork of the mp3s in the music app (ie display the wrong album cover). I see people complaining about that in forums but I guess if you are not using Apple Music they don't care.

I don't seem to be able to copy files from my iphone onto a windows desktop. Tried several cables, the transfer fails after a few GB. I guess if you are not syncing your files through iCloud they don't care.

A bug recently corrupted the iphone mail app. It wouldn't sync mails anymore, in fact would display old mails from the wrong account (I have multiple setup). I only fixed it by deleting the accounts and recreating them. That's using ActiveSync. But I guess if you don't use an apple email they don't care.

Another bug on my ipad. The USB-C DAC often fails to be recognised. Tried several DAC. I thought it was a hardware problem (usb port damaged), except that few hardware problems are resolved by rebooting. But if you don't use apple wireless headphones they don't care.

These are basic functionalities, but not using the main path which happens to be the most profitable to Apple. Apple's reputation for quality is inconsistent with my experience of their products.

It has nothing to do with profitability. The problem is there are too many devices, protocols and applications so it's impossible to test them all. You'll have exactly the same type of issues on a Windows or Linux based system. Microsoft also doesn't seem to care anymore and Linux distributions are not even tested for desktop use.

If anything, profitability of chip makers cheaping out on USB implementations is a bigger problem.

Whether you will enjoy using Apple products depends significantly on whether you are willing to go down and only down the One Apple Way(tm).

Does Apple have a public bug tracker?

No. They have a black hole you can toss your bug reports into, and they’ll swear up and down that past the event horizon they’ll see it, but you more likely than not will never hear about it again.

I've been using macs since the 90s for "serious amateur" music production, and I listen to music while working on an MBP daily, both via the headphone jack and via a USB audio interface, and I've never encountered that. Is there no idea what triggers it?

Quickly changing the system volume while the system is under heavy CPU load, plus chance.

That's indeed something I've never done. So the culprit is that the volume knob sends multiple messages and they get lost or something?

I use my Macs for audio a lot, including with headphones, and have never experienced this in 20 years.

This is one of those things that make you question reality somewhat as I know, from seeing countless videos and having some familiarity with the topic, that macs dominate desktop music production - I've never seen a producer or a DJ using windows, ever. This is apparently because the USB audio stack on mac is so streamlined that the buffering is minimal, i.e. you can basically apply realtime audio effects and mix 'live' using a USB output sink, i.e. that you can DJ with it.

Now apparently there's a game-breaking bug? For 10 years? And it's a really really big deal?

Hmm.

well this is seemingly only when adjusting volume on the Mac itself. The Apogee plugged into my Mac has its own volume control, that doesn't suffer from this drift.

FWIW, I just ran the following stress test for a bit in VSCode, and then mashed the Vol +/- buttons on an M1, and noticed that the volume toggle started to lag, but I didn't notice any balance drift. Is this something that would be reflected in the slider, or is it auditory-only?

+function() { while (1) { for (var i = 0; i < 1000000000000000; i++) { console.log(i); for (var j = 0; j < 1000000000000000; j++) { console.log(j); } } console.log('herewegoagain'); } }();

In my experience the slider definitely moves. You can see it in real time with the settings page open

To quote Apple's own (no longer available) KB-article from 2012 [1]:

"In some cases the audio balance may unexpectedly drift towards the left or right channel. This can happen if you rapidly press the volume up or down keys while the computer's microprocessor is under heavy load."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120630125615/https://support.a...

Wow, I can't even start to imagine how this bug came into existence (and why it should take so long to fix it)...

Do you think this issue would persist if I BootCamp'd Windows?

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/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.

The fact that there is an Apple-specific L/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…

In terms of serious Mac audio issues, when I got my new M1 MBP I quickly noticed a faint crackling sound (unaffected by the volume setting) in the headphone jack when plugged in via MagSafe or a left side USB port. So I just have it plugged in to power on the right side instead.

Other people have reported it too, so it's not just a one-off defect. I know electrical engineering is hard, but it's a really annoying problem to exist on a super expensive laptop.

Does your charger have three prongs or two? Try grounding the laptop properly with three prongs.

M1 MBP's only come with two prong chargers, except in markets that use the British plug. Depending on the cause of the issue grounding could help, but you'd have to buy an extension cord with a ground.

There had been a grounded tail for apple powerbticks back to the era of g4 laptops.

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/shopping?q=tbn:ANd9GcSyVF...

It's still sold, just not included by default anymore (which is fine with me, since I have tons of them)

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK122LL/A/power-adapter-e...

You can find cheaper than paying the apple tax for that plastic and metal item that has been in production for 20+ years.

Ever seen a short version without a cord? Similar to the standard two prong attachment?

Edit: https://a.co/d/6yvKXPW

Yes, I have a few 'san francisco special' ungrounded power tails but to my knowledge they were only made during the PowerPC era and did not continue into the Intel era.

e. oh grounded short adapters. I wouldn't go for that due to the wall wort issue. I usually swapped out my apple bricks to grounded tails because it was usually easier to work into whateve ad-hoc power I encountered.

I'm aware, I have two M1s, but I had a static issue on my wired headphones at one point, and I fixed it with proper grounding.

Though I can't remember if it was my old Intel Mac, or one if the newer M1s. I haven't used the wired headphones lately.

I'll see if I can find them and report back here.

Haven't noticed it affecting the audio, but you can definitely feel the grounding issue when touching the back of a charging MBP. You get a tingling / bumpy surface sensation. I've seen people complaining about getting actual shocks for it though.

I did experience the issue with an FIIO headphone DAC too. Basically, when connecting the device, the balance slider in audio settings would get initialized to what seemed to be a random value. I am using several other audio interfaces (both USB and Thunderbolt) as well for music production/recording and I have never seen that issue with any of those devices. I suppose it is an interoperability problem between the USB audio class driver and core audio that only manifests for certain types of devices. Still, if it is common enough for people publishing apps to fix it, Apple should get it sorted out.

This actually vaguely rings the bell. I think it happened just a few times and because I quickly heard it I corrected the slider and did not pay attention at the time I suppose.

Don’t think it ever happened in DAW though, only when playing audio from OS.

I‘m in the same boat. I record and produce my music on macOS precisely because its audio system is so good. I have never had any issues with it.

For me, the mentioned balance issue is only happens on Apples AirPods. With wired audio devices, or third party bluetooth, I never noticed this.

I had it happen for years with a Fiio DAC, but it only rarely occurs with my SMSL dac.

The flip side is that I get the crackling extremely frequently.

IIUC this crackling has always happened to me regardless of the OS, both on macOS and Windows. It should be solvable by increasing audio buffer size (& therefore latency), getting better hardware, or bouncing/freezing tracks to audio.

From my experience it's not really an audio bug, it's a bluetooth one. (though reading other people's comments it also happens over USB as well?)

Basically, there are lots of weird race conditions and oddities in how they deal with communicating and syncing volume between the system and the bluetooth device.

This can manifest in your system volume saying one thing and your bluetooth device outputting at a different volume when you first connect, and then you do one volume adjustment and the bluetooth device will "snap" to that volume.

Another way is what the twitter post is about, where when you ramp the volume up or down, with at least some devices this appears to be done per speaker (so per ear), and they can get out of sync. Imagine if the increaseOrDecreaseVolumeBy(speaker: id, amount: int) function was blocking and didn't queue requests. If one speaker takes longer to adjust than another one (wireless communication being what it is), the slower one will drop requests on the ground and get out of sync with the faster one.

I used to get this and never used Bluetooth audio.

If you’re using an external DAC (not just plugging in directly) I think that’ll be why you haven’t experienced it.

I used to produce a lot of music on my MacBook about 7 years ago and remember having the same thing (probably when I used to be just working on headphones straight in). I used to think one of the drivers was blown, only to (eventually, after some frustration) find that the audio was panned hard left (or right?) systemwide from the settings, and could be fixed with a single click. Never knew it was such a widely-known bug…

I'm shocked to learn 1) it's still an issue and 2) other people have experienced it.

For 1-2 years in the mid-2010s, my audio balance on my work MBP would routinely drift every month or so, and none of my coworkers or Mac-using friends, nor anyone on the tech forums I frequented had experienced such a thing. Just a few random posts on Google with no solution.

Then, it simply stopped happening. Haven't thought about it in years until I read this tweet. Fascinating!

It does not happen with all devices. I have a number of audio devices, and it happens only on my thunderbolt 3 owc dock.

I can imagine, but it happens often to me. It takes some time to notice that something feels off, until I remember. With the app I get the audio-balance-restored notification every now and then. The thing is, it's annoying subtle.

It's not that deep, right?

.. which now seemingly everyone suffers from ...

Was this claimed somewhere? Either way, it's clearly not true. You're not affected by a bug that lots of others are (myself included!), so consider yourself lucky.

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'm probably going back to android/linux. their software is literally a microsoft-tier experience (maybe even worse at this point) across the board now, and i'm not going to keep paying a premium for non-premium bullshit full of stupid bugs any junior dev could figure out.

these are just the bugs i can think of off the top of my head which have existed for literal years:

- on iphone, the haptic and sound feedback from tapping letters on the keyboard has a noticeable lag to it half the time.

- on iphone, the volume of all system sounds shoots up to 100% without warning, even if you're wearing headphones. this bug also reverses the volume level, so you have to turn the volume up to make it go down.

- 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.

- on mac laptops, the battery drains while sleeping at a rate of about 20% per day. i'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's dead.

- on mac, sometimes external storage just doesnt show up at all, restarting doesn't work, waiting doesn't work, you literally just have to try again tomorrow and hope for the best.

- 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'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.

- on any platform with siri, it will just reset to the default voice/accent regularly, making all the other options useless.

- 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 1/10 times it just... doesn't.

- on apple tv, you randomly lose the ability to navigate left inside whatever app you're in, so you have to kill it and restart it.

- 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.

- 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 will physically attack them on sight.

i actually can even think of more bugs, but i'm bored of typing.

Please do stop buying their junk. It's sad to watch people i know squandering so much money to buy buggy stuff that i end up troubleshooting for them. If it were linux we could just fix it ourselves and be done with it, but apple's entitled paternalism is the final insult. "Maybe you're holding it wrong?"

the only reason i've been using their shit is because i rely on software that doesn't exist on linux for certain hobbies and it was still drastically superior to windows which i refuse to use for any reason in my personal time, but now that it's not even better anymore, i'd rather just abandon those hobbies.

I haven't used Windows as a main-box in years, but was seriously considering it for the next upgrade. What's the beef?

not unix-like, forced updates which often break shit, mandatory telemetry, terrible ux, bloat, bugs, separate and clashing visual styles hamfistedly crammed together, hostile pushing of edge and bing... but most of all, it's a microsoft product. microsoft have demonstrated their hostility towards their paying customers time and time again.

for me personally, the final straw was after i had to replace a broken motherboard, windows wouldn't activate. i contacted microsoft and they told me it was a new computer so i had to buy windows again. i ordered a mac that day and gave my pc to a friend. each to their own but personally i'm never letting that dogshit touch any of my personal computers ever again. if i ever want to build a gaming pc again, steamOS is plenty good enough now for my purposes.

For me, when they "accidentally" released a build that showed ads in Windows Explorer it was the end. I absolutely refuse to pay for an operating system which shows me ads. They walked it back after people were outraged and claimed it was a test build not meant for the public, but I don't believe them. I think if they hadn't gotten the push back they did, we would have ads in all facets of Windows today.

I'm using about every Apple product you've listed and only encountered the first problem and even then only sporadically. I won't be saying 'you're using it wrong' but I presume different ways of use or app workload can make a big difference.

Sometimes you go help a person who complains about such things, and they have instaled 50 obscure off-brand apps, all kinds of browser extensions, kexts, background services, crapware, and so on, and the system is like a zoo.

And sometimes these bugs are just stochastic in general. We had an entire 200 person office of macbooks. I'm the only one who got a weird display issue where it would randomly just corrupt the display for a period of time, rebooting wasn't a fix, there was no predictability as sometimes it would corrupt for a few seconds, once it was corrupted all day and I couldn't work. It finally stopped happening when I got a new macbook.

That same macbook also had serious audio "crackle" issues where doing anything that seemingly caused more context switching in the cpu would introduce loud pops to the audio. Rebooting would fix the issue until it would eventually come back.

I had nothing special or interesting installed. These things would happen from using a modern IDE and firefox.

The natural scroll setting of the mouse and the trackpad are bound. You can't have one setting for one device and a different one for the other. It's maddening. Both Windows and Linux handle that easily.

I have experienced all the bug you mentioned but special mention to the Apple Music bug.

I fixed it: I switched to Spotify.

I support your decision to switch to some other manufacturers; I'm doing just that as well. Apple is making way too much money to care and it will get much worse before it gets better, at current prices it is just not acceptable.

On my iPhone 13 Pro, calendar notifications will fail, and the alarm clock will fail to ring. No idea why. I need to reboot my iPhone once a week to fix this issue, and it's been this way since I bought this phone a few years ago. No iOS updates has ever fixed this.

I also have issues with the sluggish interface. Some of my third-party email apps takes several seconds to just load the list of messages. They take milliseconds to load on a Pixel.

My lock screen can sometimes take a bit more than a second to unlock.

The browser dropdown will occasionally load the wrong page when I touch the URL.

The keyboard is more wrong than right, most of the time. Out of all the bugs and problems that make the iPhone almost unusable, it would be the terrible, auto-incorrect keyboard.

The analogy that comes to mind is when the auto industry consolidated to just three large players. Quality was never great to begin with, but it steeply declined after that. It took foreign companies to add real competition to the market.

Apple has been in decline for years now, especially since their only other competitors are Samsung and Google.

The fun surprise for me after upgrading to Monterey (which I will never stop bringing up in "Mac OS X bug" threads here in case an Apple employee is lurking) is that in new versions of Mac OS X you can't use both Home Sharing in Apple Music and bluetooth headphones at the same time. You can Home Share from Apple Music with wired headphones, and you can use bluetooth headphones with other functionality in the OS. But Apple Music specifically is broken. Possible that this is related to the home sharing being hosted on a really old Mac, but it worked fine on High Sierra!

Apple Music is in general much buggier than iTunes but that's the real dealbreaker for me.

I mostly just use MPD instead, but even that program occasionally has issues, there are a handful of music files that basically cause a fault in the headphones and they dont work right unless I switch to a different song. Still no idea whose fault that is though (OS X? the headphones? MPD?)

It's almost like apple doesn't actually care ;)

Why should they? Are these people going to abandon their Macs because of these bugs? Obviously not, so why should Apple spend any money at all fixing them?

In the Jobs years it was because the person at the tob intrinsically gave a shit about making a good thing.

But you're right, it certainly seems that's the kind of game Cook is playing. Better than Windows, but no better, and keep the extra money.

It's a winning business strategy, especially when you have legions of die-hard customers who won't leave you. Microsoft has a similar situation (though many probably won't leave MS for different reasons), so it's in their business interest to increase profits by subjugating their customers with annoying ads baked into the OS. What do they have to lose? It's not like Apple's/MS's customers are going to switch to Linux (which has its own problems of course).

To be fair to Apple, it does sound like this is a somewhat rare bug (only seen in high-load situations?). It's not as bad, I think, as ads in the OS. So, as you say, Apple just needs to be a little better than MS and that's good enough.

Except apple does also put ads in their os. And you can't even permanently disable them, the iCloud nagware comes back every once in a while trying to sell me overpriced storage.

Is it saying your storage is full or why is it nagging you?

It's nagging me because I don't use iCloud.

This bug dates back to Job's tenure. Apple products were not without bugs from 97-01. In fact, they had a lot of them.

The CEO doesn’t control the fix rate of audio bugs. There’s a few layers of management between those two things.

While it is annoying, I've got much better audio performance and less hassle from macOS than with Linux or Windows, even with bugs. There were a few audio bugs that annoyed me in the '2020 videoconferencing season', but most were solved. I've noticed the L/R volume bug then, but not in the last few years and my perception was it was fixed. So, even if it's buggy it might not be buggy for everyone.

Because CoreAudio is still a lot closer to "just works" than Pulse/Pipewire/Jack on top of ALSA on Linux and whatever the fuck Microsoft is doing with WASAPI and DirectSound.

My Linux audio bug of the month is that output on all USB interfaces just stopped working. Not sure yet what changed (it wasn't an update, at least not immediately).

On WASAPI last I checked you still couldn't programmatically change the device settings from a user application, which leads to weird issues with sample rates and buffer sizes, which means ASIO is still necessary. Very sad.

For me Pipewire changed that equation.

I am now convinced it is the best audio stack on desktop.

And I don't think it'll get better, with Sonoma I'm seeing more and more audio switching bugs and weird behaviours when I connect headphones.

At least this balance bug disappeared, although it was plagueing me on my previous MacBook.

Same. The annoying thing that used to happen with bluetooth headsets, where macos suddenly decides to use them for input as well as output and the audio quality drops noticeably (full duplex, bitrate, blabla), now happens even when the microphone isn't selected.

It really sucks. I'm not using a regular bluetooth headset, these are my hearing aids and my only way to get decent sound in meetings. Switching to mac last year was a mistake.

Any application or website can select the default microphone or a specific audio device which can cause that bluetooth issue. And lots of applications are enabling the microphone even if they don't need it. I don't think switching away from mac would solve that.

The default microphone is set to another microphone.

I can assure you that I didn't have this issue in Linux. :) There were other issues, of course, but they were at least solvable.

Most conferencing applications or sites use a separate 'preferred' microphone and select that one.

I'll look into if it has something to do with that. Thanks for the tip

On KDE at least the Bluetooth widget lets you pick which audio profile to use, so if for some reason it decides to switch to a duplex profile you can just switch it back, though I can't remember the last time I was forced to do that.

I am currently experiencing an unbelievably annoying bug where once I finish on Google Meet in Firefox, all audio/video across the whole OS plays in slo-mo. I have to turn my headphones off and back on to fix it.

It's something specific to these headphones (Sony WH-C700N), as they do something different to get higher audio quality when using the microphone. Apple have helpefully removed Bluetooth Explorer from Xcode and the debug panel from the Bluetooth status bar icon, so I'm yet to figure out what mode it's using that my other headphones (Sony MDR-ZX770BN) don't.

That is so funny, sometimes I experience the exact opposite. After connecting my MacBook to my projector (ViewSonic 747), all video (Chrome, Quicktime, IINA, etc) plays like 30x faster. The only thing that helped was rebooting the laptop.

I've seen that too, and yeah, the only solution I had for the user was to reboot.

all audio/video across the whole OS plays in slo-mo. I have to turn my headphones off and back on to fix it.

Sounds like a sample rate inconsistency issue, maybe a trip to Audio MIDI Setup.app could give hints.

Reminds me of my "favourite" 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!

That has (since forever) been covered with a Settings toggle.

Keyboard -> Input Sources [edit] -> Automatically switch to a document's input source.

Checking it maintains different "active input source memory" per app.

Unchecking it keeps a global "active input source".

This only works if the next app has a text input in focus.

Not sure what you mean.

With this setting, I never have to "switch back to the default language", it only switches when I explicitly do so with a "next input source" keyboard shortcut.

Regardless if the "next app has a text input in focus" or not, the language I have set (english or my local one), sticks when I change apps.

Also, open Spotlight when in an app with alternative input language. Spotlight should switch to default, but it doesn’t, and adopts the unwanted alternative language.

The behavior I want (and get) is: nothing switches input language, except me explicitly.

So,if I'm in an app "with alternative input language X" it means at some point before I excplitly set X as the active input language (and that gets enforced system-wide). Then if I change to Spotlight, it still uses the same X language.

I understood that to be what you also want, but perhaps you want the opposite (which I haven't tried and don't really want - to have apps remember their own input language each. Then the same toggle looks to be able to cover that, but perhaps not well, as you say).

I'm typing in Notes in Bulgarian, switching to NetNewsWire, where I press K to clear all articles and it doesn't work because NetNewsWire is now in Bulgarian. It makes no sense. Same for Spotlight. It searches the system in the default system language, what should it matter that I'm currently typing in Bulgarian somewhere? Windows has an option whether to keep each app's language or apply it globally.

I'm typing in Notes in Bulgarian, switching to NetNewsWire, where I press K to clear all articles and it doesn't work because NetNewsWire is now in Bulgarian. It makes no sense.

That's an issue - some apps get it right, others don't, not sure what the pattern is (e.g. if it's apps using the same GUI framework).

I think that issue is orthogonal to the dichotomy I talked before though:

(a) one system-wide input language active at any given time, only explicitly changed by the user.

(b) each app "remembers" its own input language, and focusing that app switches to it

From what you describe, you want (b), and macOS disrespect it for some apps, despite the toggle to do just that.

For the shortcuts thougj, the OS should handle it for all apps/GUI frameworks though, and make shortcut assignments work the same respective of language chosen. I mean "Cmd-<letter X on keyboard>" should work, whether <letter X> is mapped to one character in an input source or another character in some other input source: just based on which physical key was pressed.

Long ranty post.

I'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.

To this day my $300 dock sometimes doesn'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. :|

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't. (Excluding phishing.)

But as a programmer, I am now on a course to gradually and eventually move back to Linux. Why?

- Everything is just faster. A Manjaro XFCE with the latest kernel (6.7 as of 2024-FEB-14) just makes everything fly 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 "everything in these directories is trusted, I'll suffer if I am wrong, now leave me alone" which of course I can't do.

- 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'll use it until it blows up in my face, that's non-negotiable for a $8000 machine. So I'd think whatever performance gains or optimizations are being done for macOS, the Intel architecture is probably a persona non grata already.

- Just lately Erlang'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.

- 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'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.

Honestly, after using macOS full time for about 4.5 years, I am not impressed. I like the displays a lot 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's be honest, has paid for itself already, many times over).

Another thing I do like is the menu bar and I'll duplicate that functionality on my XFCE laptop soon enough, so not much of a loss.

I believe at one point I'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's benefits on my side. And I didn'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't do that without a VM... did I mention I never found a truly good VM manager for macOS?

But that tinker-ability is just the tip of the iceberg and this comment became huge enough already.

If you have gotten this far -- any ideas how to properly secure an XFCE environment? I'll need to install Chrome and Zoom at one point but I don'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's not possible on XFCE I am open to migrate to whatever other DE allows it.

Thanks for reading.

My $8000 M3 Max MacBook is having all kinds of crazy issues so it's not just Intel... Apple pays significantly less to SWengs than Meta/Google so I guess you get what you paid for on their side. I just wish I got what I paid for as well.

Yikes. I'm really sorry you're going through this. Are you considering alternatives, or are you collecting fixes?

I'll see if future Sonoma updates fix them or not. I have two other MacBooks and some NVidia-based laptop so it's not a single point of failure luckily.

People who have been doing hackintoshes or were installing Windows on Intel Macs have known for a while that macOS is rather slow compared to the competition and with of the lack of features/functionality you have to pay for on top of the way more expensive hardware it is a very bad deal.

I think people sticking with macOS are doing it for convenience and because it is hard to switch to something else when you have done things a particular way all your life. But considering the price of Macs, currently it is an unbelievably bad deal but as long as there are fools to pay the price nothing will change I guess.

Using my iMac Pro has objectively improved my eye health; the displays are amazing and my eyes are almost not getting tired.

But yeah, beyond that the deal gets worse and worse with time. Apple are dropping the ball, it's been visible.

As mentioned upthread, I'm very likely to start using my Mac as a thin client in the next years: get all the benefits of Linux (ultra speed included) with none of the drawbacks (insecure desktop environments; the X11 protocol literally allows you to capture all key presses once you connect), and all happening through the best displays there is.

So it's not about being a fool. There are objective benefits to using Macs. But, these benefits are dwindling with time, so the equation gets less and less in favor of Apple.

I’m lucky my current Mac sleeps well, but in the past I’ve resorted to sleeping the display only (and never sleeping the Mac itself) when I’ve had wake from sleep issues.

The additional power and heat is incredibly small in the long run, and without spinning rust it likely even extends the life as it doesn’t have cool/heat cycles.

I considered it but the iMac Pro has high idle power draw.

Though I probably wouldn't feel it because no matter what I tried I couldn't make it not wake up for 30s each 5 minutes anyway...

I don't think I've ever seen this or heard anyone talk about it. I've had at least one Mac since 2006 and all the engineering departments I've worked in since 2014 have been all Mac. Mostly at work I'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..

There are plenty of things I can complain about and I kind of think Mac OS is getting worse, but this one hasn't hit me.

While people can have different experiences. I did have a L/R drift issue on an older Mac (PPC days) - Do you know what I did to have it resolved? I didn't write a twitter post, I contacted apple support.

When the support person couldn't address it they assigned an engineer who worked with me to identify the issue - the bug was patched in the next x.x.1

That's literally all it takes. I've gone down this route 3 times now in various products of their, so I know it's not some off chance to be assigned an engineer.

It beggars belief that people think complaining to the wind will get the problem resolved, when all they need to do is contact the manufacturer.

Err... Wasn't the entire point of the post that the bug is nearly 10 years old?

the person said they download 3rd party app 10 years ago

I don't see anything there about contacting Apple

Maybe I'm optimistic, but I find it unlikely that someone went to the time to build this app, maintained it for the last eight years, and thousands of people went to the trouble to find it, install it, and leave a review, all without anyone contacting apple about their problem.

Edit: Apple was well aware of this issue (or a similar one), 12 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20221205223648/https://support.a...

Their response? "deal with it"

Sounds exactly like the example someone else used elsewhere in this thread of only one channel responding to volume changes.

The common form of this bug is way older than 10 years and isn't really specific to macOS.

The problem is that audio devices do not have an explicit concept of "balance". It'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't know if this was caused by the device itself adjusting the balance or the volume adjustment message being ignored.

So for example:

1. User tells laptop to increase volume from 50% to 60%

2. Laptop tells device's right channel to go to 60% (success)

3. Laptop tells device's left channel to go to 60% (failure)

4. Laptop checks with audio device, sees 60% on right and 50% on left

5. Laptop changes audio balance to be nudged to the right

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 "fighting" over the correct volume. Better closer-to-realtime scheduling can reduce the risk of messages being dropped.

Not sure if that's related to Apple's original problem, but in the scenario you are describing, the fix is trivial: detect when level commands are dropped and retry (up to N times / for up to X milliseconds). And don't forget to check existing volume between steps 1 and 2, so you can be made sure what the previous state was.

I don't think the "fighting" will be a problem at all - you'd have to to press volume control on device and on Mac at the same time, within milliseconds. And in the worst case, you'll run out of retries, and it will be no worse than situation today.

Who should detect, who should retry, and how?

I don’t know the macOS audio stack in detail, but I work on state synchronization problems in distributed systems and my intuition for problems like this is that the “why not just” solution almost never solves such a bug completely.

This is not a distributed system though, it's a local device, attached by USB or on some bus. So: who should detect? device driver. Who should retry? also device driver. How? by re-issuing the same request.

I've made drivers for badly designed hardware, and it's really not not that hard when you control the pieces. I mean, if it was Windows with all that backwards compatibility stuff and drivers written by 3rd party manufacturer than sure, it could be hard.. but Apple controls entire software stack, so they have no such excuse.

And the most important part is that the problem is very error-tolerant. Sure, having random balance change once per day is super annoying. But instead, imagine having one random volume change command per day be ignored.. People would not even notice, it would be a great improvement.

This is not a distributed system though

Are you sure? Audio volume is usually not (only) controlled in the device driver. Modern OSes usually have some type of audio mixer, often in user space. I'm pretty sure that this is actually where the problem lies, not in the hardware driver (given that it also persists across reboots).

This means you need IPC, and depending on how your API looks like, that's not that trivial to do right for inherently non-atomic operations.

A proper fix could be e.g. moving to a system where the IPC call is of the form "decrease global audio volume by 10%" and is executed atomically by the OS audio mixer, but that could well require backwards-incompatible changes. And...

Apple controls entire software stack, so they have no such excuse.

Even Apple can't break backwards compatibility with all existing audio applications.

Does not surprise me.

I recently discovered that interrupting the close-all-apps-before-reboot workflow when applying a macOS upgrade (e.g., "don't terminate my terminal process yet, one sec, okay, I'm good to reboot now") requires a redo of the ENTIRE update process (including redownloading the 13GB update!)

The exact same thing applies to online reinstall of the macos. If your network has even the slightest jitter, you download the whole 10gb from the start. It was blowing my mind that there is a download manager/system, in 2024, can't even resume download a file after encounter network problem. Come on, you really shouldn't assume everybody have a perfect network that can just download a file from 0% to 100% without problem. That is almost a dream in a office room with shit tons of 2.4g / 5g devices.

I'm similarly amazed when I'm downloading something from Google Drive and I get jitter -- Google Drive does not support restarting, so if it's a 10GB file, here we go again from the beginning.

What is it with these huge corps missing the simple stuff?

Even funnier is upgrading ventura could brick your Mx if you had changed the refresh rate on the display.

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.

Might an ill fitted case or something, but those phones had different cases.

Anyone know if this is some bug or am I being dumb?

Happens to me with keyboard clicks on iOS: suddenly they jump from the standard low volume to very loud clacks.

Mine (possibly related) is volume will look normal but be super quiet - touch the control at all and suddenly it’s as loud as it looked.

With iOS 17 I started experiencing something similar. Whenever I use Control Center to decrease volume to zero, two out of ten times or so it moves it back to 15-20% (seems random). I have no idea if an app running in the background is causing this, or the OS, but is very annoying...

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.

Agreed, I thought it had been fixed as I haven't seen it on any mac newer than 2013. I really hope someone someday breaks down why this happens. I can't believe its only manifested in <10% of the total macs I've ever used/owned.

At first I was thinking "huh, I don't think I've ever seen this before..." but come to think of it, there have definitely been a few freak occurrences of the balance suddenly getting out of whack. It throws me for a loop at first because usually the balance suddenly going out in headphones is an indicator that one or the other side is starting to die.

It's pretty rare, I've only seen it a few times, but yeah. Pretty obnoxious

I've been happily using an app available for free on the App Store to work around it for years now:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balance-lock/id1019371109

That's the app linked in the tweet. Seems ridiculous that we need an app to fix this, though.

At least it's free. I've paid for multiple 10$ apps that just work around macos bugs.

If you use AssistiveTouch on your iPhone or iPad with a customized top-level menu, every iOS/iPadOS update resets it to default settings. Apple hasn't fixed it for over 8+ years either.

That doesn't happen for me and I've been using AssistiveTouch for 10 years now

Try changing the number of icons (Customize Top Level Menu) on the AssistiveTouch to anything other than the default six before your next os update. It’ll reset to the default layout.

Wow, I always thought that it could be just my personal hearing issues, never could properly google the issue

I always thought my earbuds were wearing out unevenly, which may also be the case, but this is good to check up on every few months

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.

You know you can check in the audio settings panel?

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.

My own projects have a few so I am guilty.

Maybe they give the project “character.”

My favorite is… - set desktop icons to align to grid - have say half a dozen icons in the top right of your desktop - plug into an external display - the icons will be sort of in the same place, but not actually aligned. (Moving a single icon will cause it to go to an unpredictable place because everything around it is stepping over the place you’re trying to drop it.)

This has been the behavior for every version of MacOS at least going back to 10.2 Jaguar (2003).

This is much older than 10 years

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79384/audio-balanc...

Love how much older == 1 year

Some longstanding bugs/limitations in macOS/iOS make me honestly wonder if any higher ups at Apple actually use their own products, or do they just have fleshbots (human assistants/secretaries) do everything for them..

You should first ask if those problems have any major impact and if they impact the higher ups. Probably the answer will be "no".

That's nothing. Even though the hardware has supported it for at least 15 years, MacOS still doesn't have support for MST (DisplayPort daisy-chaining). Instead of just plugging one cable in and having two externals connected to each other, we'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.

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.

Never had this issue, but I do put the left audio to 90% since my wife's handmedown left ear airpod is dying.

It evens it out fine. Will replace at 99%.

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

I think this is a hostile policy of Apple not to bother implementing stable interoperation with non-apple hardware.

I have an LG monitor and a list of bugs I am experiencing in the macOS:

- No sound volume control

- No brightness control

- Nightshift doesn't work on it

- 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.

I used to own a 2014 VW GTI and would play my preferred audio from a USB/Lightning connected iPod touch through its entertainment system. The audio system was flipping L/R balance every few minutes, without any input from my end (volume adjustments, play/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.

I've heard the occasional random pop or click audio artifacts from my Mac mini home recording studio setup but never experienced the L/R balance issue. And with the more recent macOS versions (Ventura and Sonoma) I don't think I've heard any audio clicks or pops. I'm using an older Roland OctaCapture audio interface, but have tried the Focusrite Scarletts and some MOTU devices without incident.

A friend of mine told me he prefers Apple because "it just works".

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

I find the general scheduling of high cpu tasks to be annoying - start enough compilation threads going and you get network stoppage :-/

So it's not just me. Good to know.

But the audio/music people out there breathlessly tell everyone mac is the best for audio work?

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/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.

Shocker!! MacOS seems to have turned into a red-headed stepchild for Apple.

Hey, Windows has had a related-ish bug forever too!

Go to device properties and change L/R balance to be unequal.

Turn sound down to 0.

Turn it back up and balance is equal again.

It's odd that most Apple users don't care. And funny that Apple advocates claim that Apple is the high-quality audio choice when the stock hardware isn't.

Pssh. Fixing bugs gets in the way of "innovation" these days you un-innovative fool.

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.

https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/

I used to experience this all the time and had a 3rd party app installed to lock the balance to centre.

But it seems to have gone away in last couple of versions of macOS, have not had the 'fixer' installed since I got an M1 and it hasn't occurred again for me (so... Sonoma and the one before).

If I recall, the original reason for the bug was a stupid keyboard shortcut (helpfully mapped to "f*** up my audio balance") that was easy to trigger by accident, with no visual feedback to know that you'd done it.

I wonder if it's locale-specific, maybe some keyboard layouts or whatever still have it mapped.

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.

For some reason they think basic features of apple music should never work. Guess I'm the problem, because this is unusable, yet I won't cancel.

P.S. I'm specifically talking about certain playlist management features not working. Specifically, the "add next" simply has never worked well.

I think it's only on PC, but they do something to make your playlists unusable, if they're large. I think shuffle doesn't work at all for my uses (perhaps for tiny playlists where shuffle barely matters)

Weirdly, most of this seems by design, although it's not hard to see why. Apple doesn't want shuffle to compete with their algorithm, but WTF did we end up with? Streaming services riddled with user hostile design.

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't care very much about third-party hardware, in my experience.