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Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

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Re: Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

#171

Post by ThomasBb »

jjcm wrote: post #154

Subscription discussions aside, if you're looking for more feature requests, one thing I'd love is the ability to completely disable audio input devices on OSX. It's something you can't do today. My monitor has an audio in, and shows up as a valid audio input, but there's no mic connected to it. Zoom loves prioritizing it as a device though every time I disconnect my microphone. Likewise other bluetooth headphone aud…

Pretty sure you can do that natively; https://support.apple.com/guide/audio-midi-setup/set-up-audi...

Re: Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

#174

Post by andrewoneone »

viraptor wrote: post #87
Osiris wrote: post #75

This is really a Bluetooth issue. The same happens with any headphones that have a mic on any OS. When Bluetooth mode is switched from Headphones to Headset (with mic), only much lower quality audio codes are used. Does anyone know if Bluetooth 6 adds support for higher quality codes for Headset? It's a big issue, in my opinion.

It was a Bluetooth issue years ago. Now it's only an Apple issue where it can't use a more decent codec. On Linux you can choose the mSBC codec and get decent two-way quality on a modern headset.

It’s sometimes still an issue on windows but besides advertising the headset audio device most good headsets will create one or more additional audio devices that support high quality input and output.

Re: Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

#175

Post by elashri »

DrammBA wrote: post #169

Free alternatives: - Intel (also works in rosetta): https://github.com/milgra/airpodssoundqualityfixer - Apple sillicon native: https://github.com/Gaulomatic/AirPodsSanity

From the README.md of the second tool.

> What it doesn't do

> This piece of software is not cloud-native, has no micro service architecture, did not follow DDD principals, contains an algorithm designed by a fool, can not scale (neither vertically nor horizontally) and abuses your sense of humor

Re: Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

#176

Post by IridescentMoon »

SyncOnGreen wrote: post #58
mrtksn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool solution! But have you actually tried it? Once you try it you may find out that for some reason sometimes it will revert back to AirPods mic. I filed a bug report for that, check it out: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/763583 Therefore you will have to iron out the edge cases. Are the AirPods considered connected when you switch to your iPhone when using your Mac? Yes the continuity stuff. Also, you wi…

Sorry if you felt attacked, it wasn't my point. Congratulations on developing and shipping a fully-fledged product, I hope I'll help people in need of a "it just works" solution for this particular problem. Paying for it is of course justified, as you poured your time and knowledge to provide a fully working fix. Since this is Hackernews, I shared how I approached this problem on my devices - I use Hammerspoon to scr…

Is there any chance you could share the more complex version?

Re: Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

#177

Post by mrtksn »

DrammBA wrote: post #169

Free alternatives: - Intel (also works in rosetta): https://github.com/milgra/airpodssoundqualityfixer - Apple sillicon native: https://github.com/Gaulomatic/AirPodsSanity

Thank you, I should study those and see if I can “steal” ideas for my product! My customers deserve the best solution out there :)

Does this issue have a common name? I had hard time finding a way to fix it, ended up building a solution myself. Maybe my Googling skills got soft.

Re: Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

#179

Post by mrtksn »

felideon wrote: post #12

Congrats on building and launching the app. Building a little tool to solve a problem you have is great. My only issue is that I'm mostly using the AirPods mic for meetings. I don't want to use my laptop mic because my impression is that it picks up too much background noise. AirPods do too, but I think less so?

Thanks for the feedback, I guess it depends on which AirPods and which Mac. AirPods Pro 2 are notorious and even my MacBook Air M1 has an order of magnitude better microphone and background noise wasn’t an issue for me. Whatever works best for you!

Re: Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods

#180

Post by car »

This is an interesting topic for a hearing aid user like me. For FaceTime and other calls on my computer or iPad/iPhone, I always physically switch from my Bluetooth hearing aids to AirPods, since the hearing aid microphone isn't that good for calls (other party has problems hearing what I say). Now, this could be a bandwidth issue. Apple Audio MIDI Setup shows the hearing aid microphone as an 8kHz/16bit mono input device, while the output is 2 channel 32-bit Float 44.1 kHz.

The switching is a bit of a hassle, since I have to remove and turn off my hearing aids (which I would only do in private anyway), before putting in the AirPods. And the reverse, after the call has ended.

Therefore, it would be very convenient if I could just switch to better input microphones, like the MacBook's. I'll give this a try.

If anyone knows if this is also possible on iOS, please leave a comment.

Edit: Thanks to other comments I've learned, that switching to another microphone is built into macOS.

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