MacBook sound balance changes on its own

MacBook sound balance changes on its own(superuser.com)

21 points by arthurmorgan 3 years ago | 10 comments

zhala 3 years ago |

Iirc this has been an issue with Mac os/osx for many years. Seems like a very tricky bug to hunt down, I only encounter it maybe twice a month.

bouke 3 years ago | |

Having been bothered by this bug for many years I can only assume they don’t care.

donatj 3 years ago |

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

forgotmypw17 3 years ago | |

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.

donatj 3 years ago | | |

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

navjack27 3 years ago |

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.

cweagans 3 years ago |

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.)

MichaelZuo 3 years ago |

Do MacBook users really control their computers if something as obvious as audio sound balance can change by itself so often?

Tsarbomb 3 years ago |

My bluetooth headphones will always change to left side only when reconnecting. If I accidentally walk to far from my laptop and come back, same deal.

It is absolutely wild this bug exists.

whatwhatwhat_ 3 years ago |

Oh shit. Today I get my second steroid injection into my left eardrum for sound loss. I’ve been testing with my mbp. FML