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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

#221

Post by jjcm »

ThomasBb wrote: post #171
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...

Negative - you can only remove audio devices with the audio-midi-setup that have either been added from the feature itself, or are using the underlying APIs for audio. None of my 3rd party audio devices (Sony MX-3000, Sony MX-4000, hdmi audio out, thunderbolt doc audio out) leverage those APIs, leading me to suspect this is actually fairly rare.

You can map default audio input/outputs with the tool, but removing the audio output is a different story.

See example: https://image.non.io/8772f276-c835-479d-8867-2deae630310b.we...

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

#223

Post by jeroenhd »

1oooqooq wrote: post #71

it's funny how lonux just show you the codec in a drop-down next to the volume control. kde users living in the future as always.

Switching to headset mode has always worked for me, but switching back to headphones mode often ends up as a no-op. The button is there, but it sometimes just doesn't work. Perhaps that's why other operating systems lack this feature, they know their underlying stack and the hardware side don't make it as easy as it would otherwise seem.

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

#225

Post by mrtksn »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #217

A good trick to prevent this is to set your microphone to an aggregate device that you create with the Audio Midi Device tool that comes with your mac. Open that, and create a new aggregate device with just the system microphone. Then set that as the default microphone. And now when applications access the microphone for whatever reason, your bluetooth headphones don't switch profile and keep on using the aggregate m…

Interesting, thanks for the tip. Does it play nice with AirPods continuity?

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

#226

Post by mrtksn »

sutra_on wrote: post #204

> I decided to go with a very cheap subscription model because I suspect further development might be needed as bugs emerge or API behavior changes Right, makes me wonder how did companies even exist before the subscription model. > I don't know what would the right price be for supporting an app for years to come and still have people willing to pay for it Not to sound too negative, but your app might not even exist…

>Right, makes me wonder how did companies even exist before the subscription model.

They abandoned their products once the growth stopped and/or switch to subscription and gave their one time purchase makers a year of subscription to make it up.

One time payment for lifetime support doesn't make sense whatsoever. If it is a large company they have to employ people for a product that doesn't bring in money and for indies it means that they need to switch context from their current project, study their code and try to remember what they did and why they did it to fix a single line code.

Having a live product is a full time job even if you change a single line of a code once in a while. It's fine doing it for fee(in other words on your parents dime) when you are a teenager or when it is a passion project, otherwise its abandonware or your life destroyer(which is abandonware with delay).

Other options exist of course, like giving away the product for free then selling its control to people with other motives(widespread among browser extension developers) or sell services around the product like cloud something AI something (this one is nice actually, just not applicable to all apps).

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

#227

Post by jwtorres »

Other than using Shazam, when is this an issue for people? On Zoom or Facetime, the audio connection is almost certainly using an HFP/SCO connection, which is going to downgrade to an 8K or 16KHz sample rate regardless of where the mic is coming from.

I don't use Shazam, but it doesn't actually make sense to me that you would even use Shazam while listening to audio in your Airpods. I thought that was for music you heard from something other than your own device. You are listening to music in your Airpods and trying to identify a song from another source at the same time?

This just isn't making sense to me.

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

#229

Post by microtonal »

oatmeal_croc wrote: post #228

I mostly use Zoom for work calls, you can select microphones and speakers individually. I found that if you select your Airpods as your speakers and your laptop as your microphone, the sound quality on the Airpods suddenly get way better.

Yes, because when you switch on the mic on most Bluetooth headphones, it will switch to the headset profile and use the SBC codec in place of AAC. Also see here for a longer description:

https://www.recadio.com/blog/why-is-bluetooth-sound-quality-...

Apparently newer generations of AirPods use the AAC-ELD codec which should improve this on Apple devices.

You should be able to see in Console.app what codec gets used.

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

#230

Post by microtonal »

gukov wrote: post #224

AirPods Pro 2 mic is so, so bad. Went back to EarPods ($22 CAD on sale) -- the mic is practically studio quality now.

Is it the Mic or the fact that it switches to a lower-quality codec when the mic is also used. EarPods are wired, so don't have the same issue.
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