Macbook pro 16" M1 pro 2021 popping sound OS 12.0.1

Cannot believe this is still an issue. Searching through the forums this has been around for a long time.

Having LOUD pops come from the speakers every so often on a laptop which cost a fortune is just not acceptable.

I didn't say that they did - apologies if that wasn't clear. The T2 was effectively an Apple Silicon co-processor in Intel machines, so whether or not an Intel Mac has a T2 and isn't experiencing the sound issue would be helpful to know, given that I heard of a similar sound issue on an Intel Mac with a T2.

OMG, still this issue! SHAME ON APPLE!

I have last updates, MacOS Monterey 12.4

Reproducible in all cases described in this thread.

No matter: 44,100 Hz or 48,000 Hz, on charge or not, high CPU or not.... - crackling is played from various apps and music/video services anyway!

What should we do? Like..ALL devices affected, or part? Can we get it fixed in any Apple official store on Earth?(I have no official Apple store with genius bar in my country...only official dealers...) If yes, it's gonna be "apple refurbished" device after fix?

I was getting popping sounds while watching youtube, and restarting safari fixes the issue until it starts again. I wonder if it is a OS software issue seeing that it affects different apps and restarting or changing settings can fix it for some users.

I have had mine in to be repaired twice (they sent it out, not just done in an Apple store). Didn't fix it at all. I've been on the phone all morning with a rep basically to have them say we just need to wait and see if anything new comes out of this. I'm livid. This is not a cheap computer and I paid extra for Apple Care. I've already been without my computer for two weeks just for it to still make the popping sounds constantly.

I've had this issue on my MacBook Pro 14" M1 (base model), and it can get pretty severe and jarring. However, I'm almost certain it is related to the Chrome Browser. It is most notable with YouTube playing on Chrome. However, I also ran into issues when running YoutTube on Safari but only when Chrome was running alongside. Shutting off Chrome, cleaned up the audio issues on Safari.

I never had Chrome installed on my MacBook Pro 16" M1, and have had this sound distortion when using any sound application. Restarting will seem to eradicate the problem, but with a little time, the issue returns.

It's almost August 2022 and there is still no fix for this issue. I've been experiencing the same thing. The MacbookPro speakers are completely useless because of this issue. Are there any solutions?

P.s. for me, the issue happens regardless of the CPU load, the OS version (it's the latest) or the application running.

For me it's rare except when a memory swap (not cpu load) is in progress.

One easy way for me to reproduce it is to have audio playing and then plugging in or unplugging an external monitor. Then the popping is guaranteed until all the window placements are completed.

DON'T SEND IN YOUR DEVICES! It has nothing to do with hardware. It's a software issue. What you hear is rosetta not being able to keep up translating the audio-stream therefore loosing samples, which makes the clicking and pooping sound.

There are no solutions at the time being coming from apple. It has nothing to do with the hardware. It is an issue with rosetta, aggregate devices and/or buffering of the Audio.

There are some workarounds though. If you install any software core audio drivers (mixup audios' decibel, sonnox's listenhub or something similar) the problem goes away immediately and doesn't return when you set the sample rate buffers to a reasonable size. So unless you run nothing (not even one process) that needs rosetta, this problem will not occur anymore. Apple won't fix it and will hope complaints go away when in 2 or 3 years everything runs natively. It's a shame but that's how it's gonna be, I fear.

I am a professional audio engineer and read a lot about it in the apple dev forums, so if you dig deep enough you can find the causes and get a picture what's happening. Best solution if you need rosetta is using a third party core audio driver that buffers the audio after it is "created" by the os (grab's the zeroes and ones) and then hands it over to the speakers. This extra layer of calculation seems to introduce the necessary latency (slows the audio-stream down) so that rosetta can deal with it calculating it in "real-time".

Hey. Can you clarify this, please?

I'm not using a macbook—i have a Mac Studio Max. I first noticed the tiny audio glitches when testing Logic, but then realized it happens even when playing back youtube videos. I thought maybe my Focusrite audio interface needed its software updated, but then i found the same issues with headphones plugged directly into the Mac Studio.

What are examples of third party audio drivers, and would that be a solution considering my specifics?

I have been an Apple 'freak' since the mid 80s, and i cannot believe this situation, if it truly is a problem with apple's hardware or software. They call it a "Studio" and it is ostensibly made for designers/musicians/producers... yet this is a significant problem (assuming mine is the same as is being reported in this thread....). And again, my issue is tiny audio 'glitches,' not really "pops" that occur maybe a couple/few times per minute. Almost imperceptible, but significant enough that it makes listening to music a silly experience, and writing/recording music absolutely unworkable.

Additional info: I just tried listening to a synthesizer played into the Focusrite interface into Logic, and i did not detect any audio glitching from that. So, it seems like external audio sources are not affected, but software instruments used in Logic ARE also included in the issue.

Someone suggested maybe bluetooth devices might be the culprit, but i deactivated my Kensington Turbo trackball, and that didn't resolve anything.

What "Singervienna" said seems to be working well for me. I tried both mixup audios' decibel and, sonnox's listenhub. Sonnox's Listenhub ended up working well because it is a system-wide application whereas mixup seemed to only be a plugin. You can get a trial for 15 days. So all you need to do is install it. Then switch your audio out to the new Sonnox's ListenHub, and make sure you change the settings in ListenHub input source to system, and output device to whatever you want the sound to come out of. Ill update if it stops working I have been using it for 2 days without any issues.

Nevermind. I restarted and flushed the PRAM and my glitching seems to have stopped. Also, my System Updater is now showing that 12.5 IS available, when previously it had said i was up to date. So, lots of weirdness going on, and i guess the audio glitching was just a part of that.

I named a few in my reply. Google helps: But here you are some links:

https://process.audio/de/products/decibel

https://www.sonnox.com/news/new-sonnox-toolbox-listenhub

https://www.globaldelight.com/boom/

I cannot believe this situation, too. But it being a software problem I think that a switch to another processor architecture can bring up such bugs. Anyway what I do not understand is that this should have occurred in beta testing and should be a known issue. But there is silence from apple about this. Also, when it is realtively easy to mostly eliminate the problem by using a software driver "between" the software playback stream and the hardware outputs then why does apple not build that ability into core-audio or rosetta or wherever in the stream a tiny buffer seems to be neccessary. It would still be a workaround I suppose, but it could be communicated and used until one's OS works without any software that relies on rosetta. I also wrote to all audio product manufacturers that are important to me to please not sleep on the issue of translating their products to the apple native architecture, because some manufacturers consider to not upgrade "older" stuff like hardware drivers, interface software or VST Plugins. We need to get off rosetta as quickly as possible, but I feel some manufacturers struggle with providing updates as quickly as we would wish for.

I still hope apple can and will do something about it. In the dev-forums the talk goes that they know about this (how would they not) and might be able to provide a fix. But in the meantime we are at 11.5 so 5 updates did not fix the issue.

So my observations again:

The cause of the issue is rosetta. As long as ANY (even just ONE) process is active using rosetta it occurs.

The problem worsens immensely when using aggregated devices.

The wrappers (third party software core-audio-drivers) help a lot, but might not be perfect and might need to be reset from time to time (meaning that it might be necessary to manually reset the buffer size like once every 3-4 hours) depending on the task and load (throughput) that the driver has to handle.

Another Observation:

Those crackles occur especially on Youtube (or any other "thing" that comes out of a browser. It is ridiculously present in Spotify, but it. doesn't occur with iTunes/Music. So there seems to be some software that gets affected by this more and other software that isn't affected at all.

I never had any problem with crackling once I work in my DAW's (Cubase, mainly). Those are Applications that introduce a buffer themselves because they have to to be a able to handle the processing they apply to the audiostream) So this way rosetta also seems to have enough time to do it's translation for the processors to calculate and the audio stream passes through all soft and hardware stages without loosing samples. If crackling occurs (which also happens and always has, when the sample buffer size is set to small for the system to handle the processing) you just set a higher sample rate buffer size and things are fine again.

So I hope this helps y'all to understand and workaround. Pity we have to.

cheers,

Stefan