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Comment by _asummers | Hacker News Reader

Semi-related: But does anyone know why unplugging headphones while audio is muted causes the audio to become unmuted? This is easily my least favorite bug and results in a 10 second shuffle of frantically finding the mute button again, sometimes with the laptop closed. It seems like something that would never pass QA in previous iterations of Apple, though I could be remembering the past more fondly than was true.

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Volume value is stored separately for each audio interface, and I don’t think they’ve added a special case to zero all interfaces of one is zeroed.

Also begs the question of the reverse. If I muted my headphones and then slightly raised the volume, did I intend for my speakers to start very softly when I do go back to them?

My favourite bug is the one where your audio gets randomly panned until one day you realise you're only listening to the Left channel of the music, and you have to go into audio settings and pan it back to the centre

Yep, I've had this problem too many times. This app seems to fix it for me: https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/

dude, thanks so much!

I see this with other stereo systems. It remembers the volume for each input used. If you were playing out of your speakers and you had the volume set low, it remembers. If it was playing through headphones with the volume high, it remembers. It also remembers if you had it muted or not. It can be frustrating if you don't know what's going on, but if you do its a really nice feature.

It is not a bug. It is the default behavior. If you don't want to have sound after unplugging headphone, just set the volume of the speakers to mute.

This does not persist for me. I will mute, then unplug, and audio begins playing. I have to either explicitly pause audio or have muted before plugging in the headphones.

You have to mute while unplugged, then next time you unplug it will be muted.

Was the audio unmuted last time the headphones were unplugged? I don't have any apple hardware but this is a common feature of Android. Your laptop might remember the state "speakers are on but headphones are muted". So when you remove headphones, it switches to the speakers and starts playing.

This is actually by design, I think, though it's arguably pretty surprising behaviour. Every audio output has an independent volume; it's just reverting to whatever the speaker volume happened to be.

Have you tried reproducing this with other headphones, 2 channel ones etc.

I have not tried that, though I will experiment. It seems to be an issue with the latest OSX version (Mojave), as I cannot recall it happening on the last OSX major version (High Sierra?). I do not have new headphones across this version switch.

As a workaround, I have to go to the audio app and explicitly pause, which I frequently forget to do if the audio is muted. My desk mates have heard way more samples of my library than they'd like, I'm sure.

Not sure if it's present in OS X, but I know at least iOS has impedance memory, so it'll recognize specific headphones and set the volume to what it was last at when they were plugged in. It's a really nice feature.

TIL. That's really cool.

    if (unplugged) {
        mute = false;
    }

Some Mac developers thought this was a good idea. It's clever on paper I guess, but it completely breaks the typical sane user's expectation of volume control behavior.

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