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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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..
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.
[+] [-] tmikaeld|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] TwistedWave|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamwpj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckman212|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conradfr|2 years ago|reply
Also I use an old AudioBox USB and it sometimes dies and needs the unplug/replug.
[+] [-] philistine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|2 years ago|reply
Could this be an electrical issue?
Are you bus powering your interfaces?
[+] [-] goblin89|2 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] TillE|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SCdF|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danhau|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidpointer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raydev|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|2 years ago|reply
The flip side is that I get the crackling extremely frequently.
[+] [-] faebi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gok|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ukuina|2 years ago|reply
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!)
[+] [-] mmis1000|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okamiueru|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kpmcc|2 years ago|reply
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balance-lock/id1019371109?mt=1...
[+] [-] 10729287|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soundnote|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dinkblam|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] OJFord|2 years ago|reply
'Just works'!
[+] [-] ben7799|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quitit|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anentropic|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ttfkam|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] donatj|2 years ago|reply
https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] naveen_k|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|2 years ago|reply
At least this balance bug disappeared, although it was plagueing me on my previous MacBook.
[+] [-] chedabob|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andrelaszlo|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trilbyglens|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiroiushi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duped|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] peachpossum|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] j_4|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Sakos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickdeckard|2 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] madaxe_again|2 years ago|reply
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79384/audio-balanc...
[+] [-] rented_mule|2 years ago|reply
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balance-lock/id1019371109
[+] [-] addandsubtract|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_duf|2 years ago|reply
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79384/audio-balanc...
[+] [-] NoNoisle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Razengan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MilaM|2 years ago|reply