Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 237 posts

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#141

Post by diebeforei485 »

aeonik wrote: post #130
TillE wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

Does your charger have three prongs or two? Try grounding the laptop properly with three prongs.

M1 MBP's only come with two prong chargers, except in markets that use the British plug. Depending on the cause of the issue grounding could help, but you'd have to buy an extension cord with a ground.

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#142

Post by dinkblam »

kpmcc wrote: post #42

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. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balance-lock/id1019371109?mt=1...

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.

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#143

Post by duped »

trilbyglens wrote: post #8

It's almost like apple doesn't actually care ;)

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.

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#145

Post by avery17 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #133
nonninz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this using Firefox on a 2019 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM. If the laptop has not been restarted for a while, Firefox tabs will eat up more and more memory over time until it makes the mac kind-of unresponsive (*) and will need to get hard power cycled. The only signs that this is about to happen are two: 1. Any audio-emitting webapp will start to get very choppy, whether is youtube on FF, Google meet on chrome, o…

This seems unusual for such a serious memory leak to be present. Do you have any addons/plugins in Firefox? One of them may be the cause of the leak.

Uptime, 456 days 12 hours 8 minutes and 42 seconds. Firefox, 668 tabs. Countless other background tasks. Why doesn't my audio work!?!

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#146

Post by soundnote »

jwells89 wrote: post #121
10729287 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s because despite those issues, depressingly macOS still delivers an experience that to most Mac users is preferable over that of Linux or especially Windows. Increasingly it’s not that macOS is incredible, but that the alternatives are that much worse. And I say this as someone who uses Windows and Linux daily alongside macOS. Windows isn’t going to get any better so long as Microsoft’s betting on pushing service…

Apart from MS's obsessive Bing pushing, I'd say Windows is easily better than macOS. Explorer beats Finder, PWA/Chrome profile support is nicer, window manager is better, archives are handled natively, touchpad gestures for eg. virtual desktops on small laptops are competitive. With a normal mouse, middle click for eg. hold to drag just isn't supported. The natural scroll settings for mouse and trackpad are bound, when you'd usually want them to be the opposite of each other.

As far as I know, iCloud is less well-featured than OneDrive.

As a recent MBA owner, the only thing I think Apple nails is hardware. The battery life and low power use are amazing and there's something to be said for Apple's ability to force-move devs to ARM.

The rest, not really. The OS is aggressively mid, as the kids would say.

...okay. Apple still makes native apps. That counts for something.

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#147

Post by kube-system »

rogual wrote: post #39
shiroiushi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the Jobs years it was because the person at the tob intrinsically gave a shit about making a good thing. But you're right, it certainly seems that's the kind of game Cook is playing. Better than Windows, but no better, and keep the extra money.

This bug dates back to Job's tenure. Apple products were not without bugs from 97-01. In fact, they had a lot of them.

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#148

Post by mmis1000 »

ukuina wrote: post #112

Does not surprise me. 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.

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#149

Post by MilaM »

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.

Re: Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

#150

Post by duped »

coldtea wrote: post #91
theshrike79 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now having learned that, I really (really) wonder how such a bug can happen, and how it can stay ignored for so long by the always-ranted-about masters of vertically integrated luxury computers. More the former, though. My first guess was that "volume up" is actually "increase volume on left channel" and "increase volume on right channel" And when there's high CPU load, one of those commands gets lost or ignored fo…

And they can't synchronize this?

Normally the solution to this is to have a pair of parameters, pan and gain and compute the discrete channel gains from those two parameters. That way there's no synchronization and you can handle changes to those parameters independently.

It sounds like they have inverted the relationship between what is displayed to the users and what is used by the machine.

Post reply on HN