Macbook pro 16" M1 pro 2021 popping sound OS 12.0.1

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".

I've made some progress on this issue. It was discovered earlier in the thread that the audio glitches/pops start to occur when there is high memory swap activity. I've found that 9 times out of 10 the cause of my high memory usage is Safari - typically when I have several YouTube tabs open. So today I searched the Apple discussion forums for a fix to Safari using excessive memory...

...and I seem to have stumbled upon a workaround fixing my audio glitching issue. A post in a MacOS memory leak thread suggested that switching the MacOS appearance to "Light" mode instead of "Dark" or "Auto" would prevent MacOS from using swap memory so aggressively. My MBP M1 Max 32gb has been set to "Dark" mode since the day I bought it, so I switched to "Light" mode and...it worked! Safari still uses a silly amount of memory but it now uses the actual RAM pool first, rather than utilising swap memory so soon. I'm currently sitting at 28.3gb of memory used but only 1.38gb of swap used now that I'm in "Light" mode, compared to over 10gb of swap memory when I was in "Dark" mode, with the same session of Safari tabs open.

Now my audio is crystal clear with zero pops or glitches. It's not an ideal workaround - I much prefer "Dark" mode as I find it less fatiguing on the eyes but if it means my audio stays clean then tolerating "Light" mode is the lesser of two evils I guess.

Obviously, Apple still needs to fix this issue. There's no reason why switching between Dark and Light modes should have such a significant effect on MacOS memory allocation behaviour! It's a ridiculous workaround and shouldn't be necessary but here we are.

For anyone interested, here's the memory leak thread I'm referring to, and the helpful reply with the "Light" mode fix is by "Tyronne98" - Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak - Apple Community

Had the same issue on my MacBook 16" M1 Pro 2021.

'codeaudiod' process had lots of system calls and consumed 2x30% of high-efficiency CPU cores (total CPU consumption was low).

The symptoms gone after removing '/Library/Preferences/Audio/com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist' and '/Library/Preferences/Audio/com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist' followed by the MacBook reboot.

Looks like some kind of the audio settings migration failure since my MacOS and MacBook passed 10 years of upgrades.

I found a SOLUTION for the crackling on 16" 2021 M1 Macbook pros which might be the same case for many MANY people with the same model

It was not software related NOR hardware 'failure' but something very simple. This is linked to a slight flaw in the design, which is not really talked about.

PROBLEM: Crackling and popping on Right OR Left speaker during "bassy" sounds. Software updates and sample rate changes fix nothing.

Note: Generally, software issues will happen on both sides as the sound engine should be sending the same signal to all speakers.

Solution: Clean your the grills on the sides of the 16" M1 macbook pro & if necessary, the subwoofer.

How I came about this issue:

I bought an 2021 M1 16" only a few months ago because I heard of such great reviews and it was second hand (only used once by a company then packed up). I actually LOVE it.

To my dismay, the crackling and popping started and I was distraught after spending the money. Software updates and changing sample rate did absolutely nothing.

Thankfully I still had about a month of Apple Care left and so I sent it over to apple thinking the speakers had popped or something.

A week later, I get my M1 16" back with a note from the Apple Repair Centre stating that "Dirt was cleaned" as the "Fix" to my problem. That was surprising as it's not in a particularly dusty area.

But it worked and things played perfectly for a well with the audio... at least for a few months.

Then the crackling started again on my lower right speaker.

I figured it was the BASS speaker which is located on front right area of the 2021 M1 16" right where there is a grill.

Apple Care had ran out and I wasn't going to send this all the way back and pay for it to be "cleaned". So I decided to check how to (safely) remove the bottom case to check the bass speaker and got all the tools.

Low and behold, the right bass speaker had a couple tiny stones/grains of sand or debri. I brushed it gently off and used an air spray to dislodge any debri then closed the case.

The Crackling and Popping disappeared once more!

I do hope that in the newer models / future models that Apple address this flaw as this was overlooked in the design for sure.

The grill next to the bass speaker is wide open for any debri to drop in it. Once lodged in the subwoofer, you get a wonderful crackling from the vibration of the diaphragm. There are no filters or anything to stop small bits of dust of debri from slipping in - say you are working outside and wind blows something in or if your travel bag stores the laptop on it's side and debri falls in the unprotected grill.

Most laptops would some form of spongy filter - perhaps this was never thought of or ommitted to improve sound dispersal. Either way - it was a bad idea.

I hope this helps someone! If you have apple warranty, please send it in and don't open it. It's not worth voiding warranty unless it's out of it AND Apple will realise people are having this problem. It's an expensive piece of kit to have such a simple but annoying flaw.

Hi everybody,

(sorry in advance for my poor English. I'm French. Thx)

Here is what I found about this problem :

• Having "Intel app" opened creates the problem. So I'm not using any "Intel app" (except Boom 3D which doesn't create the problem). I deleted all "intel app" automatic launchers from Microsoft or Adobe that I found in my system.
• Having a lot of tabs opened in Safari or Chrome creates the problem right away. And in a painful frequency. It's worst when the tabs are Youtube tabs. Easy fix : I stopped opening 50 tabs at the same time :-D
• Using Photoshop creates the sound problem right away. Despite begin a "Universel app". I can create some crackling sounds at will with Photoshop :-D. When writing this message, I have some crackling sounds going every five minutes. ****! I forgot to close Photoshop. So I closed it and the problem was gone right away. The Photoshop problem is probably the only source of the crackling sound I cannot fix.

What I didn't work in my case :

• Changing the audio preferences as said in previous post didn't work for me
• Entering "sudo killall coreaudiod" in the Terminal cleans the problem if the sound problem persist after closing browser tabs or Photoshop. But it doesn't solve the overall problem.

My guess with all this : it's a memory problem in a way or another. The problem is linked to some apps and how they are used.

With all that said, I'm now a happy user of my M1 MacBook Pro.

I hope it will help.

I had this problem on a brand new MBP 16" M1 and it now seems to be resolved. Here are the steps I took:

• Deleted the two audio driver .plist files as described by others in this thread. I thought the problem might have been from bad settings migration from my previous system. This may have improved things, but did not completely resolve the issue, there were still glitches happening every minute or two.
• Updated the OS from 12.2.1 (I believe it was..) to 12.6.1

Since the update a day ago I haven't noticed any glitching. Knock on wood, will update if it comes back.

Hi all. I did reply in a previews post saying that changing it to 44 hz fixed the issue. However it did not. Instead kept getting the popping before and after notification sounds. The popping seems to have been getting louder. I thought was a hardware issue but found out its a software issue. I installed the eqMac app, a few people mentioed using this and fixed the issue. NO MORE POPPING. Also wanted to mention that im using the latest update 13.0.1. You would have thought apple would have fixed this issue by now. I cant remember ever having this issue when the M1 max was brand new. It seems to have developed over time and gets louder and launder. But for a fix for now install eqMac app. After install no config is required, just let it sit in the background. If the issue comes back with eqMac app installed, I will let everyone know.

I know exactly what is going on here and I doubt there's anything we can do to fix it on our end.

Previously I reported logs that I saw from bluetoothd saying that there was a buffer flush. This seemed to occur at the exact same time as the popping noise. At the time my headphones were only connected via bluetooth so I thought that was the issue.

I have since tested this issue with wired headphones and can say the problem still exists. This makes sense as some people are reporting the issue through their laptop speakers and other's through bluetooth. Now we know it's also occurring through the headphone jack, the source must be more fundamental than the bluetooth driver errors. I believe the errors seen in bluetoothd logs are only a result of what I've just seen from the coreaudio service.

The logs I've seen from the coreaudio service confirm exactly what I suspected. It's a driver issue with coreaudio under heavy system load. This can be seen by the following logs:

  4611         HALS_OverloadMessage.cpp:267   HALS_OverloadMessage: Overload due to HAL client proc exceeding io cycle budget
  4611         HALS_OverloadMessage.cpp:273   HALS_OverloadMessage: Overload due to the driver taking too long

Component: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreAudio.framework/Versions/A/CoreAudio

These logs show basically that the core audio client is "Overload"ing and exceeding some timeout deadline. This is direct confirmation that it is a result of high system load on potentially the CPU. I get that the file listed in the logs is the file which handles OverloadMessage calls, but it's called by CoreAudio to display these messages.

Pretty shocking considering Apple is a big player in the audio department and markets themselves as a platform for music creation.

I assume the apple engineers don't look at these posts but seriously what are you guys doing??!!

Hi Tommy8850,

Sorry to hear you're experiencing issues with you new Mac.

I feel I can shed some light on this as an owner of several 2021 16" models (of which all of them experience this crackling noise) as well as having a background in Audio engineering.

This speaker popping is sadly - and more frustratingly - an issue that stems back some time and occurs across apps: both native to Apple and 3rd party ones. Apple support are aware of the issue (I've been frequently advised of this each time I log the issue with Apple support directly). When I first got the 16" model back in 2019 not long after buying it, it started exhibiting this issue. The crackling/popping started when scrubbing through videos in YouTube, then would move into apps: Final cut, logic and even Adobe at times, as well as the music app (to name a few).

I've seen numerous reports across forums about the popping appearing when the machine undertaking high CPU tasks: this is certainly one of the ways the popping becomes visible, but from my new 2021 machines I've had the popping sound appear across both native Apple and 3rd party apps with varying CPU usage. I am certain it's a deep rooted software issue: so deep rooted in fact I'm using some of my own monitoring equipment to try and send data to help Apple as this issue has been going on - in my eyes - a bit too long now and is starting to become frustrating.

I'm not aware of 12.1 completely fixing the issue, as I've had a couple of crackles and pops here and there but so far if it's stopped for the time being, fingers crossed you're system will continue to work popping free - it'd be great if you could keep us posted on this.

All the best!

Open Music and check if the equaliser is switched on or off. If on, switch it off. I did this last night, and the clicking and flatus ceased immediately. I re-activated the equaliser and the flatus immediately returned, switched it off and the distortions vanished. The equaliser is off now, and, so far, no noise distortions. Fingers crossed.

This happens specifically with aggregate audio devices and when such an aggregate is uses it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with CPU load. I am on a MacBook Pro (16", 2021) with MacOS 12.4 installed and the problem hasn't been addressed in any of the recent updates. It must have to to with Core Audio, Buffers, anything like that.

Funny thing is: As soon as I use a third party rapper like decibel from premix or Sonnox's Listenhub or Sonarworks Sound ID the problem is gone immediately. So it must be that if a Software "grabs" the zeroes and ones that represent the audio-stream before it goes out to the hardware this introduces a latency or a buffer that then "repairs" the audio-stream to the hardware outputs (your speakers or D/A Converters). That's why all major DAWs don't show the problem. because they have delay-compensation built in (which is also a buffer). So I cannot use Spotify, the magenta-tv app, the brave browser without also routing the audio through one of those 3rd party applications. Hope apple will fix this soon because it is more than annoying. It's close to a downright fraud to sell machines that go for quite a price and are praised as the cream of the crop state of the art that then are not able to output proper audio. I know that apple maybe is working hard on those issues but I reported my observations many times but apple doesn't reach out. I am an audio engineer and could maybe help, but unless there is a way to get contact to apple I am just a customer that just has to deal with annoying workarounds, that also sometimes do not work for all necessary tanks.

Have the same issue with popping cracking sounds on my 14-inch MacBook Pro OS 12.4

After some Acitivity monitoring the issue seems to happen when Memory (not CPU) is moderatly loaded.

Below is the screenshot of when the memory pressure starting creating the sound.

The pops/cracking even appear when listing on AirPods Pro connected to the MacBook.

I spoke with Apple Support and they reccomended to send the Mac for repair, even though admitting that they don't know if the issue will be fixed.

Has anyone gave their MacBook away (for a week aparently) and had this succesfully fixed?

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

Just wanted to chime in on this again. I have been able to repeat the instance when I have Chrome and Safari open at the same time. When the audio glitch starts, it can be aggravating and jarring. Another poster mentioned it is related to an audio buffer related issue. Having used audio recording software before, I can say the sound of this 'glitch' very much sounds like a buffer issue.

However, I can consistently get the issue to go away by closing Chrome, and watching YouTube on Safari.

While on a vacation, I've sent my macbook 16" M1 away for service to address this issue. And of course, they 'did not find anything' and returned it. BUT, they did install Ventura 13.2.1 (22D68), and although I am just a day in, the popping sound has not appeared yet.

I'm very sure it's a software issue, and this update might have fixed it, or at least minimized the bug. But I will have to try a little longer to be sure. Normally the popping sound would have occurred already, but I have to take into account that this is a fresh install and I haven't got all my apps installed yet.

Good news so far - of all suggested fixes, I suggest you update to 13.2.1 as the most highly probable fix.