News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

August 27, 2007

troubleshooting

My sound balance issue: a solution

Posted Aug. 27, ’07, 8:33 AM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Troubleshooting

soundbalance.jpg

Yesterday, I wrote about an issue I was having where my Mac’s sound output would randomly shift to the right side. It didn’t take long for you guys to weigh in with your comments, and it turns out I wasn’t alone. Reader Christopher in particular directed my attention towards two things: a possible cause and a solution.

First, the cause. The System Preferences slider appears to sometimes move by itself when the keyboard volume keys are pressed, especially if they’re pressed rapidly or if the processor is under heavy load. This last bit is particularly interesting, because I still have an eMac and you guys mention it mostly affects you on older machines such as Powerbooks. As Christopher pointed out, this is documented on Apple’s website, although only for OS X 10.2 — needless to say, I’m running Tiger and this is clearly the same issue.

So if Apple hasn’t fixed it, who will? Why, a third-party developer! In this case, Christopher found a very simple free daemon, aptly named “balanced”, developed by Whamb, a small French and Swiss company. You basically download it, install it, and the only thing it does is monitor the Mac’s sound balance; as soon as the balance shifts left or right, balanced immediately snaps it back in the middle. I haven’t run into any problems, but it’s worth mentioning this runs at the root level.

In conclusion, it seems this simply is a peculiar bug, but thankfully, there is a reasonable solution in the form of balanced. Thanks to everyone who weighed in and hopefully we can enjoy well-balanced sound from our computers in the future.


3 Comments

Paul said:

Thanks! I'll give it a try.

August 27, 2007 8:42 AM
jayH said:

that's great thanks! this is a bug that bugs me a lot lol

August 27, 2007 11:38 AM
Mark U. said:

I had no idea I had this problem until I read your original post. On a whim I checked my sound balance and sure enough -- I was crooked (to the left). I think I'll avoid the root process in favor of just checking it from time to time, but this was still good to know about. For the record, I'm on a G5 iMac running Tiger.

August 27, 2007 6:23 PM

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