Mac Audio Balance Bug That Apple Knew About 12 Years Ago Still Exists

[1129846]

Maybe they didn't bother fixing it because it's a relatively rare bug? I've been using Macs for almost 20 years now and I've never heard of an issue with audio balance before. 🤔

More likely not an super clear on the cause, super deep in the code and not a major issue.
I worked on one app that every regression there was a handful of known bugs that would get reported and the same answer was "Not to fix" we had a list of Jira numbers we would copy past for that same list every time.
Reason for not fixing. Super deep in the code and very core to the application so high risk for a list of very minor bugs. So never fixed. That was for 5 years and based on the last time I looked at the app they are still in there and still not going to ever get fixed.

 

[1129846]

I am glad some good samaritan decided to prioritize it and develop a free solution, even if Apple did not deem it necessary.

It doesn't mean they have fixed it. They more likely just put a bandaid around the issue and the root underlying issue is still there. The Bandaid most likely take extra cpu load and memory load to do it so not something you ship with an OS.

There is a lot of reason why it might never be fix like super deep to something core so very high risk of breaking something critical in doing it. That is why on some software I worked on the the past we had a handful of known bugs that we marked as not going to fix. Way to high of a risk for what was a minor annoyances to some users. The fix we knew was deep in something very core and was not worth the risk nor worth the massive time investment to fix it. To the user it might appear to be a 5 min fix but in reality the fix was going to take us days and super high risk. Hence for nearly 5 years I was there we refused to fix it. It existed when we first launch and was still there 5 years later. At least spot check of the app from what I can see I bet it is still in there at over 10 years.

 

[mxrider88]

Damn. The iMessage one hits home. Anytime I reset my hardware and reenable the settings I end up in limbo with continuity. Usually takes a few enable/disable enable/disables to get it working again (and even then it’s not guaranteed to last).

Now I’m angry at myself for turning a blind eye to it, cause the reality of handoff/continuity is riddled with issues where “it works when it works and doesn’t when it doesn’t”.

Given these features are huge reason for staying in ecosystem…. They really should fix all the bugs. Same thing with using my iPhone as a webcam. 3/4’s of the time I can’t get it to work with zero explanation why…. And it’s supremely annoying to discover since you usually only try it when you are prepping for something time sensitive.

I have hundreds of emails exchanged with apple regarding this and other issues over the years.
They are extremely slow to implement changes, they don’t understand the issues you try to explain, like if they were not even working with macOS but the thing that shocks me the most is that after 2 major macOS releases and many .x releases once we got to a semi-working situation with continuity (forget the other issues), it all breaks apart again in the next update.

They have really serious issues in the software department.

 

[MagicBird]

Well, that's Apple for ya today.
If not enough people complain, they don't give two cents about it.

‘Today’ he says… for a bug that is a decade old.

This just indicates it is probably an extremely rare thing. The majority of people likely do not ‘rapidly press the volume buttons with the system under load’

 

[1129846]

^^ This.

I've been using a non-Apple peripheral that connects to a USB port for ages. OK, to be accurate, since I bought a 2015 iMac. It's worked perfectly every time. I'm actually on the third generation of the peripheral now.

Last summer, I upgraded from the iMac to a Mac Studio. The peripheral worked perfectly under all the versions of Ventura. Then, I got caught up with that magical upgrade that I didn't ask for or accede to (the one that so many people insist is imaginary...) for Sonoma.

From that point, the peripheral didn't work right, at least using the USB-A ports as I was using before. (I'll skip the details.) Connecting to a USB 4 port on the rear worked fine.

As it happens, I am good friends with the designer of the peripheral. I told him what happened. He told me that another guy had told him the same thing. So, he contacted the actual Apple engineers he'd worked with in designing the device.

Guess what!

They were shocked and never even heard of the problem.

My interpretation is that Apple management is so focused on the new stuff that they carefully filter out everything going to the engineers. There's layers of people deciding what to work on and what to put aside. There's no glory in fixing things, only in making new stuff. You don't get a bigger bonus by fixing something that shouldn't have gotten past the test phase.

More than one book has been written by former Apple employees who describe the culture there with management. I don't mean Tim Cook level management - the layers beneath him. The general impression I get is that their goals may not always align with users' goals. But, I could well be wrong about that. It's clearly working for Apple the way things are and working for those managers. In one sense, that's validation for what they're doing. Doesn't help us, though.

The hard part is that these problems continue with each generation of macOS unless they're fixed. At some point, they've invested so much in not fixing the issue that it may attract the wrong kind of attention to make it right. Oops.

Most of that sounds pretty normal at any larger company. Management or more so the product manager not the engineering manager but the product managers just override everything and want only to fix bugs. I have had those type of argument on fixing bug vs rushing out new feature at every place I have worked. Things work really find until Product management gets control of engineering and over ride the engineering department. Separate chains of command. It just get really bad when Product get control engineering to the point they do evne allow engineering time to do maintances and fix bugs. it is rush everything out and create more bugs.
I say all this as Apple has more and more going way to far to product controlled instead of engineering controlled.
I find things work the best when it is engineering controlled and lead instead of Product/ MBA controlled. Yes they are slower but higher quality.

 

[kwamayze]

This thing annoyed and frustrated me for months until I used an audio balance app. Only occurred with one Bluetooth device (big jambox which I had been using for years) but not with others. Updating to Sonoma fixed it.

 

[fredrik9]

Maybe it’s a hardware bug that causes it? Maybe these small rare bugs can be fixed by a future Apple coding AI bot. It might be so small that humans are too expensive to put on it.

 

[String]

I haven’t been back to check but the Apple Lossless skipping bug is quite annoying. When listening to Apple Lossless streams music can skip about 2 seconds into the track for a split second. Most annoying. I reverted back to aac to avoid this. Probably allowing an extra second before play to download a larger cache would solve this.

 

[zapmymac]

M2 base mini, 2 nights ago. Wired headphones, drifted right. I thought the plug had partially came out from either the Mac and/or my headphones. Check and check. I have the midi app in the dock or easier access to changing sampling rate, so I checked and it was ever so slightly not dead center. Now I know. Thanks everyone 🙏✌️

 

[TracerAnalog]

Holy beach balls Batman! I thought I was having a hearing problem now and then… never expected the Mac to be the problem. I’m going to test this tomorrow.

Update: installed ‘Balance Lock’ and my problem is solved. Happy this was reported by Macrumors!

 

[svish]

Hoping to see a fix in the near future.

 

[MajorFubar]

I gotta say audio on macOS seems remarkably primitive. Windows and Linux for more than a decade now have had independent volume controls for each app, for example. I don’t understand why they haven’t addressed this. Similar situation on iOS, way too few audio channels and too hard to control the volume of them.

I depends on your intended purpose. Maybe casual users would like better integrated controls. But for creators, the 'primitiveness' of MacOS audio functions is its absolute backbone. Just ask Windows musicians what hoops they have to jump through with third-party audio drivers like ASIO4ALL just to avoid the latency caused by all the additional processing that Windows invokes. As an audio creator I'm very happy with how MacOS audio works. Also the ability to make virtual audio interfaces by merging two or more together in Audio Midi Setup has no match in Windows and is an absolute Godsend.

 

[CarAnalogy]

I depends on your intended purpose. Maybe casual users would like better integrated controls. But for creators, the 'primitiveness' of MacOS audio functions is its absolute backbone. Just ask Windows musicians what hoops they have to jump through with third-party audio drivers like ASIO4ALL just to avoid the latency caused by all the additional processing that Windows invokes. As an audio creator I'm very happy with how MacOS audio works. Also the ability to make virtual audio interfaces by merging two or more together in Audio Midi Setup has no match in Windows and is an absolute Godsend.

Thank you for this feedback. I am clearly not a professional audio producer, but I wondered about this.

I wonder though if they could just add individual volume channels for each app without messing up the high end stuff. That’s all I really want. I believe Rogue Amoeba makes an app that will do this but it requires a kernel extension.

 

[Piplodocus]

My biggest Mac audio gripe is DriverKit audio drivers. Since MacOS started complaining that kexts would be banned and I should move to DriverKit drivers, I updated my RME UFX II interface drivers from kext to DriverKit ones. It's had no end of glitches, pops, weird Youtube audio after sleep that appears to be the wrong sample rate and I have to close and open Safari or reboot to fix, etc. Every time the screen locks and I unlock it while audio is playing: big audio dropouts/pops. This has happened over all the versions of RME's driverkit drivers and although some people seem to have had some good luck with them, I've had a whole load of annoyance right up to the latest. Finally lost my sh*t with them the other day and installed the kext-based ones again. Been absolutely solid and trouble-free ever since (and slightly better latency, as well as all the other crap gone).

If Apple do finally force DriverKit drivers with no way out, my next machine will be a PC. Simple as that. Spending over £4.2k on a laptop for music production, then it being a ****-show of annoyance with the driverkit framework, isn't my idea of fun (or Pro).

 

[Victor Mortimer]

So I'm NOT crazy. Yeah, I've seen this bug, never could figure out why the balance kept shifting left.

It's not happened much on this 2015 MBP, but happened all the time on my 2012.

 

[Rob__Mac]

This used to happen to me when I was a student - 15 years ago!

 

[MXBY]

How do you reproduce it? The note from Apple so many years ago makes it seem like it happens in a specific circumstance, but is that true?

I'm not sure what produces/reproduces the issue. It seems to occur/have occurred "spontaneously" when connecting audio outputs, in my case AirPods. Which is of course bad, since AirPods are often reconnected to Macs.

(Assuming that we are indeed talking about the same issue as the post describes).

 

[rehkram]

I'm not sure what produces/reproduces the issue. It seems to occur/have occurred "spontaneously" when connecting audio outputs, in my case AirPods. Which is of course bad, since AirPods are often reconnected to Macs.

(Assuming that we are indeed talking about the same issue as the post describes).

I was wondering if this occurs with output devices connected via Bluetooth? In my use case it doesn't occur with all-digital multichannel connections (HDMI, DisplayPort), the down-mix to analog stereo 2.0 occurring "out of the box" obviously.

I don't have AirPods but do connect wireless noise cancelling Sony headphones to the Macs occasionally. I just connected them wirelessly to check. I do see the balance slider in sound settings, and it is centered.

Then I hooked up wired phones via the mac's output minijack. Same result, balance is in the center.

Now I'm wondering if this could be caused by an app or apps changing the balance in software (uncommanded by the user) and not resetting it to center on exit- or crash?

 

[Shirasaki]

Yeah, we now all see where apples priority goes. Vision Pro. iOS.
Is that audio imbalance bug an easy bug to fix? Maybe not. Has that bug been neglected? Absolutely yes.
Even today the AirPods Pro connection switch still needs much effort rather than “seamless” as Apple always claim.
I haven’t experienced that bug personally, but I know Apple has lost all of its “it just works” vibe.

 

[honglong1976]

Well, that's Apple for ya today.
If not enough people complain, they don't give two cents about it.

The bugs going on for years. This is a Apple today and a past Apple problem.

 

[hiphopdan]

The Boom Audio app provides an option for fixing this issue.

 

[mannyvel]

One major problem when trying to fix this bug (or any bug) is trying to figure out where to start. What would trigger a change in the audio balance setting?

MacBook sound balance changes on its own

Platform: 2017 MacBook Pro, running macOS Catalina 10.15.2 Context: I had a pair of broken headphones where the right bud was much quieter than the left. So, I adjusted the volume settings on my M...

superuser.com

This is something a senior person should grab for fun, because it'll be ridiculously hard to track down.

 

[BostonQuad]

Apple's not alone. By chance I just came across a bug with Google Drive that's been documented for at least 9 years, and is still not fixed. Namely, while VOB files are supported and most will play, some will not. As VOB is a legacy DVD format, I expect this will never be fixed.

However, I expect that this "balance drift bug" is more relevant to Apple's audience than the one I mentioned is to Google's.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Then, I got caught up with that magical upgrade that I didn't ask for or accede to (the one that so many people insist is imaginary...) for Sonoma.

I've had strange issues with Sonoma too. Nothing that I couldn't work around, but definitely problems that didn't exist previously.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

FWIW, I haven't noticed such a thing since getting my M1Pro MBP at the end of 2021.

It's less prevalent on Apple Silicon macs, because they're faster, and the bug happens when the CPU is being heavily utilized.