Apple still hasn’t fixed a 12-year-old problem regarding macOS audio balance

According to MacRumors, Apple still hasn’t fixed a bug in macOS that causes the audio balance to drift on Macs under certain conditions, despite having acknowledged the issue almost 12 years ago. A developer named Fabian highlighted the problem in a post on X.

From the tweet: “The year is 2024 and Apple still has not fixed the audio left/right balance bug in MacOS. I still have to use an app to fix it automatically. The app is from 2015, that means we are approaching the 10 year anniversary.”

Balance Lock is the app involved. Here’s how it’s described: Noticing that the audio balance for your headphones is going slightly to the left or right? Balance Lock was designed to solve this by keeping the audio centred either in the middle or to a custom lock point. No more annoying left/right audio drift! It runs unintrusively in the background, monitoring the audio levels to ensure that when plugging and unplugging headphones, the audio stays centered. It even has special support for USB audio devices so ensure all types of headphones are supported.