10-year-old macOS bug still causes headaches for Mac audiophiles

As much as we love our Macs, they sometimes do things that annoy us greatly. This annoyance turns into frustration when Apple does nothing to resolve the problem. If you’re lucky, a third-party fix is ​​available.

Take, for example, a macOS bug that has plagued some Mac users for years. The problem comes from the audio balance, where the sound is distributed more to one side than the other. This problem persists for Twitter user Fabian/X (@ffaebi)who wants Apple to finally do something about it.

Fabian was able to fix the problem himself using a third-party app called Balance Lock. The app does what its name suggests: it runs in the background and checks that the Mac’s audio is balanced between its speakers. Otherwise, it adjusts the audio and locks it.

Balance Lock, according to @ffaebi, has been available since 2015 and was released to fix this macOS bug, since Apple didn’t do so. So this has been a bug for almost 10 years or more. Balance Lock developer Tunabelly Software offers it for free (and ad-free) and is compatible with Intel and M-series Macs.

Several people responded to @ffaebi’s post saying they also had an audio balance issue. The Apple Support Community online has several articles addressing the issue, and suggested fixes vary, including restarting the Mac, booting into safe mode, then restarting the Mac, resetting the CoreAudio driver, and disconnecting/reconnecting external speakers or headphones. None of these recommended fixes work, leading one to conclude that this is a bug.

Fortunately, in this case there is a software fix, but it shouldn’t be this way. There’s no way of knowing why Apple hasn’t fixed the problem – maybe it’s because it’s hard to reproduce (I’ve personally never had this problem), but it doesn’t. is not an excuse. Apple has fixed other “rare” bugs, so it should fix this one.