It's 2025 and Apple still has not fixed the audio left/right balance bug | Hacker News Reader

It's 2025 and Apple still has not fixed the audio left/right balance bug

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43 pointsfaebi15 comments

Might want to mention what the bug is [0]:

> Noticing that the audio balance for your headphones is going slightly to the left or right? Balance Lock was designed to solve this by keeping the audio centred either in the middle or to a custom lock point. No more annoying left/right audio drift!

I've never personally noticed or heard of this bug, myself.

[0]: https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/balance_lock/

I ran into it all the time when I had a Mac from work. I even went through the hassle of setting up a hammerspoon script to fix it.

It happened occasionally on the older Intel MacBooks before the 2020s but I can't remember any instance of it occurring in the past few years.

edit:

Reader the old thread linked below remind me, it usually only happened when I was using non-Apple bluetooth headphones (never had AirPods).

There are so many bugs not fixed over years it really makes me angry. One stands out, which is the idleassetsd process downloading and deleting wallpaper files over and over. This not only depleted my data plan multiple times when abroad, but also writes hundreds of gigabytes on not-replaceable SSDs. Ah, and the process uses all remaining memory and incredible cpu resources. What the f… is this s…? It almost feels deliberate, regarding M1+ SSD life expectancy.

It was design to nudge Apple account holders into purchasing additional iCloud disk space.

Has anyone ever figured out the trigger conditions? I’ve heard about this for years but only from a handful of social media posters who must have some usage pattern in common.

I experienced it when I was using headphones on a headphone jack on multiple Mac laptops over time. Haven’t used that setup since the shift away from Intel though.

Yeah, I don’t doubt that it’s happening but I’ve been using headphones on Mac laptops since the turn of the century (OS X 10.0) so it’s mildly amazing that it hasn’t happened to me.

It’s boring. It’s a boring bug. Like mouse acceleration.

The post of last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460

I didn’t even know this was a thing. Is there some weird condition you have to get into for this to occur?

Wait so it's a bug(!), I always thought something was wrong w/ my headphones.

Nope, it’s a bug! Been happening for years and years. (Unless you’re using certain fancy headphone amps and the volume is below 25% and it’s not a mechanical relay volume knob, in which case that could be it too.)

The snark is that they are just a small dev shop and cannot afford the time nor the costs to go and debug that just yet.

> The snark is that they are just a small dev shop and cannot afford the time nor the costs to go and debug that just yet.

Testing shall be done by the user. This is so Microsoft. Maybe Microsoft should sue them for copyright infigement ( just like Apple did). /s

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