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MacBook sound balance changes on its own

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Re: MacBook sound balance changes on its own

#3
post #2

I was just complaining to a coworker about this on Friday. I have to correct my audio balance all the time, it’s obnoxious.

Not sure if you got far enough on the linked page, but there's a utility to automatically fix it when it happens:

https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/

Of course it's kind of messed up that this is necessary, but there it is.

Re: MacBook sound balance changes on its own

#4
post #2

I was just complaining to a coworker about this on Friday. I have to correct my audio balance all the time, it’s obnoxious.

Not sure if you got far enough on the linked page, but there's a utility to automatically fix it when it happens: https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/ Of course it's kind of messed up that this is necessary, but there it is.

I am going to try the fix of just changing the bit rate back and forth first, see if it stays.

Re: MacBook sound balance changes on its own

#8
I automated a fix for this with Hammerspoon. https://github.com/cweagans/dotfiles/blob/master/.hammerspoo...

(Context: I’ve only had this happen when I connect my Caldigit thunderbolt dock. This dock has always caused the audio to change balance to ~90% left since I unboxed it, so I suspect it has something to do with how the audio interface presents itself to the system, but I don’t know for sure.)

Re: MacBook sound balance changes on its own

#9
Every single system update or sometimes even reboot I have to do this on my M1 Mac Mini that has a fiio DAC connected to it over USB. It will always be all the way left or partially left balanced when it boots back up. It's especially annoying because I get frequent beta test updates for MacOS, so it's not like an occasional thing.

I don't care about the why this happens. I don't care that the DAC I use is really old. This is just a thing that shouldn't be happening on a modern operating system that has such an apparently old pedigree in high quality audio.

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