No idea why, but hey, it works, and I don't have to reboot my entire Mac just to listen to audio again!
Select your Airpods in the list of devices (the one with 1 out or 2 outs).
So after having this happen three times, I've found one solution which doesn't require a reboot, which works every time, restoring a pure, 48.0 kHz audio stream to the AirPods: Or anything, really, besides terrible quality audio streams or AM radio. This app can quickly highlight the problem that occurs when the AirPods get stuck in low-quality-output mode:īasically, the AirPods get stuck playing the Bluetooth audio stream at 16 kHz, which is okay(ish) for voice calls, but sounds terrible if you're listening to movies or music. MIDI is really only a tiny part of what this app does! As with last year's post, How I discovered my left AirPod was bad, in which I discovered a handy Bluetooth device diagnostics tool called Bluetooth Explorer, I have long known about an essential built-in audio app on the Mac which has been around for years: Audio MIDI Setup.īy the name of the app (not to mention the icon-a music keyboard!), you wouldn't know that it's kind of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to diagnosing and configuring almost any audio I/O aspect of your Mac, including surround sound inputs and outputs, microphone levels, output levels, and other specialized configuration. It often happens when you're using the AirPods' microphone with VOIP apps too.Īpple has some pretty awesome little utilities, though, which can help in these situations. This happens sometimes in other situations too sometimes the AirPods switch to 'old POTS voice call quality mode' (as I call it) and stay there even after you hang up on a phone call.
What's happening behind the scenes is something in Vagrant or VirtualBox's boot sequence is making a change on the computer to assume some control over USB and/or audio IO, and that seems to-sometimes-affect the audio mode used by the AirPods. It sounds like you're listening to a song played through a long subway tunnel or something.
Sometimes (maybe 10% of the time) when I run vagrant up to build a local development environment for one of my software projects, and I'm listening to music, my AirPods suddenly switch into super-low-quality audio mode. it's hard to execute perfectly, and as I said in my review of the AirPods two years ago, these little earbuds are as close to perfection when it comes to a wireless sound solution for someone like me. But having worked with audio devices before-though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods-I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with using AirPods across phone calls, VOIP, iOS devices, Macs, music, and Apple TVs. I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place.