Fix Found for Weird Noise from Mac OSX Audio

As I was just researching unrelated stuff pertaining to Android, I came across this post from a guy who was having an issue on his Mac that sounded exactly the same as one that’s been bugging me for months now! He never followed up on his post, but it was from about 7 months ago, so I thought it was worth shooting him a line to see if he ever solved it. He had!

For him, it was the Android emulator, but for me, I believe it was caused by VirtualBox. The internal speakers were fine, but when I used a USB DAC or even the in-built headphone output, I would get a subtle fuzz noise in the background when the music was playing. (The noise was missing when all audio was silent.) This forced me to rely on the optical output to get sound from the MacBook Pro to my headphones.

The fix is to open up OSX’s “Audio MIDI Setup” tool in the Utilities folder. Select your output device under the “Properties For” drop-down and make sure that it is selected to be “2ch-16bit” on the right. For some reason, these apps seem to want to switch to “2ch-8bit” and that is what causes the problem. It does appear the fix will need to be performed again after each use of these applications.

Don’t really know who to blame for that one… But thank you, Duncan, for the tip!

I hope this helps someone else. I had no luck searching for a fix, myself.

Friday, October 30th, 2009 Audio, Computers

1 Comment to Fix Found for Weird Noise from Mac OSX Audio

I can confirm that the culprit is VirtualBox 3.1. When I run Windows XP in VirtualBox, it resets my Mac’s audio from 2ch-16bit to 2ch-8bit. Very annoying.