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Comment by unwind

5 months ago

Following the link, and a few more, describes at as changing "when volume buttons are pressed during high CPU load". That is perhaps random-seeming, but also way different from actually being reandom.

I have never used a (modern) Mac long enough to listen to audio, so I have no experience with this I just thought it sounded odd.

Now having learned that, I really (really) wonder how such a bug can happen, and how it can stay ignored for so long by the always-ranted-about masters of vertically integrated luxury computers. More the former, though.

It sounds almost as if there already is software somewhere that is doing something to maintain the proper balance (perhaps due to bugs in the hardware), and then that something becomes CPU-starved and/or interrupted when the volume changes, and doesn't resume properly. This is a wild guess straight outta ... Hampton, I have no clue about Mac hardware or macOS internals. Fun to think about, though!

I hope they fix it for real, soon!

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unwind

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theshrike79  5 months ago

> Now having learned that, I really (really) wonder how such a bug can happen, and how it can stay ignored for so long by the always-ranted-about masters of vertically integrated luxury computers. More the former, though.

My first guess was that "volume up" is actually "increase volume on left channel" and "increase volume on right channel"

And when there's high CPU load, one of those commands gets lost or ignored for some reason.

  • coldtea  5 months ago

    And they can't synchronize this?

    • duped  5 months ago

      Normally the solution to this is to have a pair of parameters, pan and gain and compute the discrete channel gains from those two parameters. That way there's no synchronization and you can handle changes to those parameters independently.

      It sounds like they have inverted the relationship between what is displayed to the users and what is used by the machine.

madaxe_again  5 months ago

There are worse bugs that happen under high CPU load - I reported that you can interact with applications behind the hibernate Lock Screen… 9 years ago. You still can.