MacBook sound balance changes on its own | Hacker News Reader

MacBook sound balance changes on its own

superuser.com

21 pointsarthurmorgan10 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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

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