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Bluetooth audio lag

Just updated (17th.Oct.2014) to OS X Yosemite. Im having trouble with bluetooth connection. There is an audio lag on my bluetooth headphone which progressively gets worse. Im using Sony DR-BTN 200. Is there a temporary solution until they fix it?


P.S. I found others with similar issues as well. Ive tried re-pairing the connection to no avail. Any help would be appreciated.

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Oct 17, 2014 9:27 AM

Reply
436 replies

Nov 25, 2014 7:59 AM in response to AdiumX

Out of those who updated to 10.10.2 and claim to have no problems now, are you by chance using any Bluetooth devices aside from the speakers? My speakers are possibly improved on 10.10.2, but still having issues… however, when I use my Bluetooth mouse in addition to the speakers, I get horrible skipping and cracking almost immediately.

Nov 29, 2014 9:35 AM in response to mommu

its been a while now since i did the clean install of Yosemite and i was too lazy to do another one for mavericks. I have to say though that the lag is much much less than it was before the clean install. Especially Quicktime seems to be ok. Ill leave it athis for now.


Btw, another Bluetooth bug - I now know that my headphones wont connect when my external display (with audio over DP) is conected. Only if i disconnect it, the Bluetooth Headset will conect. Also Safari cannot be open during this! Must quit before and then re-open.


So much fun to figure out this stuff. Deja-vu of my Windows days.

Nov 29, 2014 6:04 PM in response to mommu

I've been experiencing the similar issues with my Bose AE2W bluetooth headphones when playing music after updating to Yosemite. Songs skip/stutter every other second making it a very frustrating experience. No issues with the headphones when paired/synced with other devices. The headphones are basically rendered useless until this gets fixed. I'm more than willing to work with a tech/engineer to help troubleshoot.

Dec 2, 2014 5:04 PM in response to mommu

I had the issue as well, then I tried something that worked for me.


I am using Beats headphones as well, via bluetooth on a Mac Pro (2013)


Open terminal


type in: sudo killall coreaudiod


enter your password


close terminal


problem fixed 🙂


reality is, coreaudiod is an issue with the last two OS's for Mac. No idea why, they say do a complete install again... where as I say, really Apple? How about a simple patch to fix your faulty coreaudiod?


doing the terminal tweak, your bluetooth sound issues will be resolved.

Dec 2, 2014 10:16 PM in response to jamesrt

jamesrt, I'm not an OSX expert, but running that command resulted in my playing music stopping immediately, and I couldn't get sound working again still I opened Sound Preferences and started clicking around (or perhaps just waiting was what did it), but once the sound was working again, the skipping and popping and delay was immediately present. As with all the other supposed solutions, this did absolutely nothing for me. Did I do something wrong?


(Using MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) running 10.10.2 and connected to Jawbone BIG JAMBOX Wireless Bluetooth Speaker or LG Electronics Tone+ HBS-730 Bluetooth Headset and often also using Aerb® Wireless Bluetooth Speaking Mouse, usually playing music with Spotify, though the problem is exhibited for all audio, even the volume adjustment notification noise.)

Dec 3, 2014 10:14 PM in response to mommu

Same problem here, bluetooth audio lag happens with my iMac 2011, MacBook Air 2013 and MacBook Pro Retina 2014, all running Yosemite 10.10.1. The audio lag happens when CPU load is high. For example, when I listen to music with iTunes on my MacBook Air and have the audio stream to my bluetooth-connected UE BOOM, by firing up multiple tabs on Google Chrome rapidly, the audio will start to lag a bit. Then by compiling code with Xcode, the audio will lag further. Usually when I pause the music, it continue to play for 5-10 seconds before it stop.


I think we might be able to mitigate this issue by renicing bluetoothaudiod with a higher priority.

Dec 3, 2014 10:46 PM in response to mommu

Actually disabling 'Sound Check' in Music setting only works for a while, as soon as I disconnected bluetooth or restart the phone, audio lag was there again. I'm using the iPhone 5s and JBL onbeat awake as speakers. The delay at the beginning of each song appears to be time it takes to transmit signal from the phone to the speaker, which is about 1.5 seconds, as soon as the speaker receives the signal it starts playing, but then it fast forwards at 2x normal play speed 1.5 - 2 seconds to catch up with the phone and that's how the audio lag problem is for me. I wouldn't mind it if it is just the first song but because it happens at the beginning of every song, it kind of makes the listening experience a lot less enjoyable.

Dec 3, 2014 10:51 PM in response to I-3Music__

I<3Music, oh, you're talking about an audio problem with an iPhone?! I thought all the messages in this thread were in reference to OSX + Bluetooth. It is interesting to hear the problem also affects iOS. That also makes me less hopeful this will get fixed… and more confused how Apple's "quality control" missed this issue that affects every computer I personally tested.


howanghk, can you either test or give more info on what you mean by "renicing bluetoothaudiod with a higher priority"? I'm fairly familiar with unix systems but not as much with OSX internals. How can we control this?

Dec 3, 2014 11:32 PM in response to votecharlie

try running this in Terminal:

ps aux | grep bluetoothaudiod | grep -v grep | awk {'print $2'} | xargs sudo renice -10 -p

This command find the process ID of bluetoothaudiod, and then set its priority to -10 with renice. As bluetoothaudiod is run by root, and setting a negative priority value requires root privilege, we run it with sudo and thus it requires your password.

Bluetooth audio lag

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