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Audio popping issue back on MacOS 11.3 for 16 inch MacBook Pro
- Thread starter Abhay Bobby
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Same with me, just updated to 12.3.1 last night, so far so good. So far there have been 1 or 2 rare "hitches", but not like the consistent popping noise that it was making before. I'm very happy because I was at the point where I was going to take it in to the apple store to get it replaced, the speakers were unusable.
What Mac are you using?
Since it seems this problem also appears on non-T1/2 Macs with Big Sur 11.3+, everyone should write if their Mac is:
A) Intel Mac without T1/2-chip (<< 2017)
B) Intel Mac with T1/2-chip (2016-2020)
C) Apple Silicon (2020 >>)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#T_series
Apple Silicon M1 Max 32 GB
Edit: Also after more testing, I still do get the occasional pop, but it is once every 30 mins or so, and only one at a time. I still suspect this still has to due with CPU and RAM usage as the issue occurs more after I'm using it for a while and have the system stressed out a lot.
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Intel Mac with T1/2-chip (2016-2020)
Running latest version of Big Sur.
Waiting for my M1 Max to arrive......!
I'm going to keep my 2014 Mac mini on 10.15 Catalina as long as Chrome/Firefox is supported.
When browser support for Catalina is dropped (hopefully many years away), I'll use the mini for audio/music listening, and switch to a Windows/Linux PC for Internet use.
Even if this issue is fixed some time in the future, it may come back (as we've seen examples of).
If you know audio professionals/hobbyists that rely on their Mac I would tell them to stay on Catalina as long as possible.
When browser support for Catalina is dropped (hopefully many years away), I'll use the mini for audio/music listening, and switch to a Windows/Linux PC for Internet use.
Even if this issue is fixed some time in the future, it may come back (as we've seen examples of).
If you know audio professionals/hobbyists that rely on their Mac I would tell them to stay on Catalina as long as possible.
Guys, please make sure you report this with Apple Directly. I've had this issue for MONTHS but Apple can't fix it and refuses to refund or replace. They think it's a software issue and it certainly seems to be one but they don't seem to care too much about the vocal minority, so we all need to speak up and demand a fix for this. It is unacceptable to just live with ghetto workarounds and compromises on $2,000+ machines.
Definitely log your complaint and start a ticket with Tier 2/Escalated Apple Support so we can get some attention and a fix ASAP!
Definitely log your complaint and start a ticket with Tier 2/Escalated Apple Support so we can get some attention and a fix ASAP!
its so crazy i know 20 people with the 16 inch and none of them have this issue. still scares me to get it.
I have same issue on mac mini m1 monterey ONLY when on a skype call using skype for WEB, not the app.
P.S. does any one still have the issue on latest Monterey update?
I have same issue on mac mini m1 monterey ONLY when on a skype call using skype for WEB, not the app.
P.S. does any one still have the issue on latest Monterey update?
On macOS Monterey 12.3.1, I have this issue still. I have not yet tried macOS 12.4 beta, but at this point, I have given up all hope of them ever fixing it. I am just learning to live with it, unfortunately.
It's looks like apple feature.
iPhone 8 Plus - audio popping in wired headphones while keyboard appear. From iOS 11 to iOS 13.
iPad Air 2020 - audio popping in wired headphones every 5 seconds over Apple Type-C to Jack adapter. No audio popping with ESR adapter.
MacBook Air 2020 M1 - audio popping in wired Apple EarPods (jack) headphones while YouTube preview appear (without actually sound) in Safari and Firefox. No audio popping with Type-C to jack adapter (original Apple or ESR).
iPhone 8 Plus - audio popping in wired headphones while keyboard appear. From iOS 11 to iOS 13.
iPad Air 2020 - audio popping in wired headphones every 5 seconds over Apple Type-C to Jack adapter. No audio popping with ESR adapter.
MacBook Air 2020 M1 - audio popping in wired Apple EarPods (jack) headphones while YouTube preview appear (without actually sound) in Safari and Firefox. No audio popping with Type-C to jack adapter (original Apple or ESR).
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I took it in to the apple store, they did some diagnostics, did a factory reset, but I couldn't replicate the issue in store after the factory reset, it's like it takes time to start happening.
One fool proof way to fix it (temporarily) is to restart. This is VERY annoying to me, as I bought a Macbook Pro with 32 GB of ram for a reason, I don't want to have to reset up my workflow and tabs every 2 days or so when the popping starts, but it's the only thing that fixes it consistently.
One fool proof way to fix it (temporarily) is to restart. This is VERY annoying to me, as I bought a Macbook Pro with 32 GB of ram for a reason, I don't want to have to reset up my workflow and tabs every 2 days or so when the popping starts, but it's the only thing that fixes it consistently.
Interesting. My iPhone SE (1st gen) also pops very often when headphones are connected via the headphone jack. But it's such an old phone that I try not to draw any conclusions. I know this is slightly off-topic, but can anyone confirm if their iPhones or iPads also pop in a similar way when using wired headphones?
skulley said:
My Mac also doesn't pop immediately after a reboot. It takes couple of minutes before it starts happening again, which for me is another proof it's a software issue.
My old iPad Air 2 also pop when using wired headphones in a similar way that my MacBook Air m1 does. It hasn't always done that so I guess it came after some update.
Everyone! I have some hope. Anyone having this issue, try booting into Safe Mode and see if the issue still happens. I've been in safe mode for 2 days now, pretty much no audio popping, AND the choppy video in safari is gone as well (when watching a video in safari on a non-active window, the video chops pretty consistently). Makes me think these 2 issues are related. But in Safe Mode neither of these issues happen.
I'm going to try using my computer in safe mode for the next few days in normal work loads and then if it continues to work, then I've got to track down the difference between safe mode and normal. Hope this helps someone else having this issue.
I'm going to try using my computer in safe mode for the next few days in normal work loads and then if it continues to work, then I've got to track down the difference between safe mode and normal. Hope this helps someone else having this issue.
12.4 still has popping issues. I give up. Apple is pathetic in taking so long to fix this. As one of the largest companies in the world, you would think they would be able to fix this quickly. But I guess the only thing Apple can do now is give us updates with little to no release notes that causes more bugs and problems than the previous version did.
I was wrong about SAFE MODE fixing it. It slowed how fast it started happening, but I think that was due to safe mode turning off non-essential processes like spotlight indexing and a few other things. Eventually the audio popping starts happening again in SAFE MODE.
BUT, I did find something else. I noticed that whenever the audio popping issue started happening, the memory pressure indicator in activity monitor would turn orange. And the swap used number would increase. By A LOT. Even though memory used number was no where near the my physical memory limit (32 GB). I started looking into how swap is configured on MacOS because the aggressive use of swap when not at the memory limit seemed odd to me.
I determined there was a setting I could configure to disable swap altogether (vm_compressor mode 2). Unfortunately there is no way to tune how soon the swap starts being used, it's either all or nothing. You have to disable SIP (system integrity protection), more info here:
ayltai.medium.com
and here:
I switched the vm_compressor mode to 2 and have been using the machine in my normal workflow for the past 2 days. I have a **** ton of thorium tabs (more on that later, it's a newish chromium binary that works really well so far), VS Code, 8 GB for docker, teams, slack, discord, and a few other things, basically my normal day to day workflow, and no audio popping so far, here's what my memory situation looks like, it's basically stabilized at 27 - 29 GB of mem used because of the memory compressor compressing memory that hasn't been used in a while:
Notice 0 bytes of swap used. That's what you are looking for because I have a theory about what is causing the audio popping: when the memory pressure in vm compressor mode 4 turns orange, it starts aggressively swapping memory to disk. I believe this SSD thrashing and the resulting processing and CPU usage is what causes the audio popping and general performance degradation. I especially believe this is the case after looking at my SSD health. Keep in mind I've had this MBP 16 M1 MAX 32GB since the end of november 2021. Here are my SSD health stats after 6 months of use (May 2022), in order to look at the SSD stats I recommend installing Homebrew and using smartmontools on the command line (more info here: https://www.macworld.com/article/334283/how-to-m1-intel-mac-ssd-health-terminal-smartmontools.html):
The key values to see here are Percentage Used, Data units Read/Written. As I understand it, Percentage Used is the amount of life your SSD has gone through, as that percentage goes up, the closer your SSD is to failing. So I've used 3% of my SSD lifetime use through 6 MONTHS of using my computer. To me, that seems absurd, but please everyone check your SSD usage and let me know what your numbers look like. Also, on a 1 TB SSD, over 6 months I've read and written almost one hundred terabytes of data on the SSD. Those numbers again, seem absurdly high to me. So I've come to the conclusion that the aggressive swap usage has not only caused performance issues resulting in a audible popping noise when watching videos, but also is deteriorating my SSD at a rate faster than normal. Since I've disabled swapping I've not had any audio popping issues, and I bet if I check my SSD stats again in the future, the rate at which my SSD is being used will have dramatically dropped.
I'll report back here if I have any audio popping or if I have issues with swap disabled. The big caveat to disabling swap is that if you push your memory usage too high you will have system instability and kernel panics. I'll report back here if I run into any issues like that. Given what I know now, I obviously should have bought the 64 gb MBP, but it is also ridiculous that a computer is configured to over aggressively use swap and literally destroy itself early if the user pushes it to the limits. I've had no issues on my windows computers with 32 GB of ram under similar workloads. Windows seems to swap when it's literally out of memory, and performance suffers, and I know to close some things. On MacOS the performance suffers way before the physical memory is used up, so in effect it is like using a computer with less RAM than you actually paid for.
Please everyone on M1 MBPs: try changing the vm_compressor mode to 2 and check your SSD stats, and post them here, so we can see if this issue is more widespread. Hope this helps someone else out there.
About Thorium: I read that google chrome and the keystone updater could cause issues with performance, so I removed chrome but still need a chromium based browser for development, so I found Thorium. The person behind it has a fairly recent apple silicon build with all the things I need (h264 codecs, etc) and nothing I don't (keystone). So far so good, many thanks to the maintainer!
github.com
BUT, I did find something else. I noticed that whenever the audio popping issue started happening, the memory pressure indicator in activity monitor would turn orange. And the swap used number would increase. By A LOT. Even though memory used number was no where near the my physical memory limit (32 GB). I started looking into how swap is configured on MacOS because the aggressive use of swap when not at the memory limit seemed odd to me.
I determined there was a setting I could configure to disable swap altogether (vm_compressor mode 2). Unfortunately there is no way to tune how soon the swap starts being used, it's either all or nothing. You have to disable SIP (system integrity protection), more info here:
Need for speed âââ How to squeeze every last drop out of macOS Sierra
A macOS performance tweaking guide for hardcore Android developers
Prolong lifetime of MacBook's SSD by disabling swap and other minor tweaks - From Y to X
0. Prologue After replacing 128GB SSD with a 500GB one in my 7 year-old MacBook ... Read More Read More
windsketch.cc
I switched the vm_compressor mode to 2 and have been using the machine in my normal workflow for the past 2 days. I have a **** ton of thorium tabs (more on that later, it's a newish chromium binary that works really well so far), VS Code, 8 GB for docker, teams, slack, discord, and a few other things, basically my normal day to day workflow, and no audio popping so far, here's what my memory situation looks like, it's basically stabilized at 27 - 29 GB of mem used because of the memory compressor compressing memory that hasn't been used in a while:
Notice 0 bytes of swap used. That's what you are looking for because I have a theory about what is causing the audio popping: when the memory pressure in vm compressor mode 4 turns orange, it starts aggressively swapping memory to disk. I believe this SSD thrashing and the resulting processing and CPU usage is what causes the audio popping and general performance degradation. I especially believe this is the case after looking at my SSD health. Keep in mind I've had this MBP 16 M1 MAX 32GB since the end of november 2021. Here are my SSD health stats after 6 months of use (May 2022), in order to look at the SSD stats I recommend installing Homebrew and using smartmontools on the command line (more info here: https://www.macworld.com/article/334283/how-to-m1-intel-mac-ssd-health-terminal-smartmontools.html):
The key values to see here are Percentage Used, Data units Read/Written. As I understand it, Percentage Used is the amount of life your SSD has gone through, as that percentage goes up, the closer your SSD is to failing. So I've used 3% of my SSD lifetime use through 6 MONTHS of using my computer. To me, that seems absurd, but please everyone check your SSD usage and let me know what your numbers look like. Also, on a 1 TB SSD, over 6 months I've read and written almost one hundred terabytes of data on the SSD. Those numbers again, seem absurdly high to me. So I've come to the conclusion that the aggressive swap usage has not only caused performance issues resulting in a audible popping noise when watching videos, but also is deteriorating my SSD at a rate faster than normal. Since I've disabled swapping I've not had any audio popping issues, and I bet if I check my SSD stats again in the future, the rate at which my SSD is being used will have dramatically dropped.
I'll report back here if I have any audio popping or if I have issues with swap disabled. The big caveat to disabling swap is that if you push your memory usage too high you will have system instability and kernel panics. I'll report back here if I run into any issues like that. Given what I know now, I obviously should have bought the 64 gb MBP, but it is also ridiculous that a computer is configured to over aggressively use swap and literally destroy itself early if the user pushes it to the limits. I've had no issues on my windows computers with 32 GB of ram under similar workloads. Windows seems to swap when it's literally out of memory, and performance suffers, and I know to close some things. On MacOS the performance suffers way before the physical memory is used up, so in effect it is like using a computer with less RAM than you actually paid for.
Please everyone on M1 MBPs: try changing the vm_compressor mode to 2 and check your SSD stats, and post them here, so we can see if this issue is more widespread. Hope this helps someone else out there.
About Thorium: I read that google chrome and the keystone updater could cause issues with performance, so I removed chrome but still need a chromium based browser for development, so I found Thorium. The person behind it has a fairly recent apple silicon build with all the things I need (h264 codecs, etc) and nothing I don't (keystone). So far so good, many thanks to the maintainer!
Releases · Alex313031/Thorium-Special
Special builds of Thorium for SSE3 and different processors. - Alex313031/Thorium-Special
github.com
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Hello,
I was hopefull by reading your message… but on my big sur hackintosh, the bug is still present when the swap is turned off.
So for now I still use the workaround that really works for me, the use of Blackhole.
Maybe on real macs it works…
Still thank you as my ssd will live longer
I was hopefull by reading your message… but on my big sur hackintosh, the bug is still present when the swap is turned off.
So for now I still use the workaround that really works for me, the use of Blackhole.
Maybe on real macs it works…
Still thank you as my ssd will live longer
Last edited:
I disabled swap as well:I was wrong about SAFE MODE fixing it. It slowed how fast it started happening, but I think that was due to safe mode turning off non-essential processes like spotlight indexing and a few other things. Eventually the audio popping starts happening again in SAFE MODE.
BUT, I did find something else. I noticed that whenever the audio popping issue started happening, the memory pressure indicator in activity monitor would turn orange. And the swap used number would increase. By A LOT. Even though memory used number was no where near the my physical memory limit (32 GB). I started looking into how swap is configured on MacOS because the aggressive use of swap when not at the memory limit seemed odd to me.
I determined there was a setting I could configure to disable swap altogether (vm_compressor mode 2). Unfortunately there is no way to tune how soon the swap starts being used, it's either all or nothing. You have to disable SIP (system integrity protection), more info here:
and here:Need for speed âââ How to squeeze every last drop out of macOS Sierra
A macOS performance tweaking guide for hardcore Android developers
Prolong lifetime of MacBook's SSD by disabling swap and other minor tweaks - From Y to X
0. Prologue After replacing 128GB SSD with a 500GB one in my 7 year-old MacBook ... Read More Read Morewindsketch.cc
I switched the vm_compressor mode to 2 and have been using the machine in my normal workflow for the past 2 days. I have a **** ton of thorium tabs (more on that later, it's a newish chromium binary that works really well so far), VS Code, 8 GB for docker, teams, slack, discord, and a few other things, basically my normal day to day workflow, and no audio popping so far, here's what my memory situation looks like, it's basically stabilized at 27 - 29 GB of mem used because of the memory compressor compressing memory that hasn't been used in a while:
View attachment 2007606
Notice 0 bytes of swap used. That's what you are looking for because I have a theory about what is causing the audio popping: when the memory pressure in vm compressor mode 4 turns orange, it starts aggressively swapping memory to disk. I believe this SSD thrashing and the resulting processing and CPU usage is what causes the audio popping and general performance degradation. I especially believe this is the case after looking at my SSD health. Keep in mind I've had this MBP 16 M1 MAX 32GB since the end of november 2021. Here are my SSD health stats after 6 months of use (May 2022), in order to look at the SSD stats I recommend installing Homebrew and using smartmontools on the command line (more info here: https://www.macworld.com/article/334283/how-to-m1-intel-mac-ssd-health-terminal-smartmontools.html):
View attachment 2007607
The key values to see here are Percentage Used, Data units Read/Written. As I understand it, Percentage Used is the amount of life your SSD has gone through, as that percentage goes up, the closer your SSD is to failing. So I've used 3% of my SSD lifetime use through 6 MONTHS of using my computer. To me, that seems absurd, but please everyone check your SSD usage and let me know what your numbers look like. Also, on a 1 TB SSD, over 6 months I've read and written almost one hundred terabytes of data on the SSD. Those numbers again, seem absurdly high to me. So I've come to the conclusion that the aggressive swap usage has not only caused performance issues resulting in a audible popping noise when watching videos, but also is deteriorating my SSD at a rate faster than normal. Since I've disabled swapping I've not had any audio popping issues, and I bet if I check my SSD stats again in the future, the rate at which my SSD is being used will have dramatically dropped.
I'll report back here if I have any audio popping or if I have issues with swap disabled. The big caveat to disabling swap is that if you push your memory usage too high you will have system instability and kernel panics. I'll report back here if I run into any issues like that. Given what I know now, I obviously should have bought the 64 gb MBP, but it is also ridiculous that a computer is configured to over aggressively use swap and literally destroy itself early if the user pushes it to the limits. I've had no issues on my windows computers with 32 GB of ram under similar workloads. Windows seems to swap when it's literally out of memory, and performance suffers, and I know to close some things. On MacOS the performance suffers way before the physical memory is used up, so in effect it is like using a computer with less RAM than you actually paid for.
Please everyone on M1 MBPs: try changing the vm_compressor mode to 2 and check your SSD stats, and post them here, so we can see if this issue is more widespread. Hope this helps someone else out there.
About Thorium: I read that google chrome and the keystone updater could cause issues with performance, so I removed chrome but still need a chromium based browser for development, so I found Thorium. The person behind it has a fairly recent apple silicon build with all the things I need (h264 codecs, etc) and nothing I don't (keystone). So far so good, many thanks to the maintainer!
Releases · Alex313031/Thorium-Special
Special builds of Thorium for SSE3 and different processors. - Alex313031/Thorium-Special
However swap is somehow still used:
I've been using the system like this for 2 days, and just got some audio popping
Hello,
I was hopefull by reading your message… but on my big sur hackintosh, the bug is still present when the swap is turned off.
So for now I still use the workaround that really works for me, the use of Blackhole.
Maybe on real macs it works…
Still thank you as my ssd will live longer
I'm sorry it didn't work! I was hopeful as well, but after a few more days of testing, all I can confirm for sure is that the popping happens whenever the memory pressure indicator turns orange or red, especially if you see a sawtooth pattern in the graph, presumably where memory is rapidly being compressed and decompressed as the memory manager tries to avoid high memory pressure.
Turning off swap at best helps your SSD last longer, and at the very least helps you be more aware of your memory usage, which may in turn lead to less popping. But it doesn't fix the underlying issue. Glad to at least help in the SSD health department! Sorry for the misleading posts, I was really hoping the proposed fixes (safe boot, disabling swap) would help.