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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

#74

I'm not going to compare this to a cup of coffee, as that analogy has been beaten to death. What I will say is that $20/yr is far higher than many apps, that are much more complicated, do a a lot more, and are self sustaining businesses. Why would anyone want to pay 2x for this compared to what a really good podcast app costs? Or 7x what a good gif manager costs? This app doesn't even do anything that native macOS to…

Second this. Would gladly pay a one-time $10, but $20 annually doesn't make any sense for an app like this.

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

#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.

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

#76
This sounds like a great idea.

It's not a company unto itself -- you can't do subscription, do $3.99. There has to be some sheen of continued value generation on the producer side beyond maintenance and bug fixes to justify a subscription. Here, you're going for an impulse buy.

I highly recommend cutting down the word count for the description.

You want it to be a 10 second no-brainer, open link, read description, realize its well-founded and my $4000 MacBook Pro has a fundamental problem with my $200 headphones that I can solve immediately for ~nothing.

FWIW you lost my attention around here, though there is excess fluff throughout: "Since recently Shazam is built in into macOS and you can access it from the menubar to find songs, even with your AirPods on. It's fantastic, you should use it all the time."

In general, gotta be ruthless and cut everything out that isn't necessary. I don't care A) when Shazam was introduced B) I can use it even with Airpods on C) what you think of it D) what you think of how often I should use it. All you need is "You can hear the bug: with your AirPods on, play a YouTube video, then click Shazam in the macOS menu bar, then stop Shazam and unpause the YouTube video. How does it sound?"

You're not cutting it out because I don't care, you're cutting it out because you have about 10 seconds of attention if you're lucky, and if it runs out, you're done.

Note: I struggle with this 100% of the time :) key to understanding it more was realizing "I don't care" wasn't voiced in an aggressive way, like it would be in conversation. It meant "this was a sentence where I lost attention", and is a license to believe your message is 100% clear, in fact > 100 + x% clear and all you have to do is cut x% and you're optimal. Good position to be in.

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

#77
This is great! I've been needing a solution to this problem. However...

I would pay $20 one time for it. But a subscription is a deal breaker.

My guess is you'll make a lot more revenue by doing one time fees tied to a specific AirPod version. So each time I upgrade my AirPods, I pay a new one time fee instead of the subscription.

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

#79

I'm not going to compare this to a cup of coffee, as that analogy has been beaten to death. What I will say is that $20/yr is far higher than many apps, that are much more complicated, do a a lot more, and are self sustaining businesses. Why would anyone want to pay 2x for this compared to what a really good podcast app costs? Or 7x what a good gif manager costs? This app doesn't even do anything that native macOS to…

Second this. Would gladly pay a one-time $10, but $20 annually doesn't make any sense for an app like this.

Add me to the list. I question some of the app subscriptions I do pay for, and those offer a ton more functionality for the same $20-ish dollars. This app doesn't even have a cloud server backing it, no way I'm paying a subscription at all for a utility app with no recurring infrastructure costs.

But to be more positive: I'd love to support an app like this, which I probably wouldn't even use that much these days; I just won't pay the current pricing.

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

#80
post #4

Couldn't I just make an aggregate audio device which uses the mic on my MacBook Pro, and speakers of the AirPods?

You don’t even need it to be as complex as that, I just have an aggregate device which only has the MacBook microphone input enabled and no outputs, then you set this as your _input_ device in Sound preferences, but leave the output device as is. It’s easy to create the aggregate input device, go to the Audio MIDI Setup app, in the audio window click the plus in the bottom right and choose “new aggregate device”, the…

I was excited to try this, since I'm a bit tired of selecting the input manually multiple times per day. Unfortunately, connecting AirPods automatically switches the input to them, regardless of the previously selected input device, whether it's an aggregate device or not.
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