Right, here's the thing: If you are using AirPods(or any Bluetooth headphones with a mic in fact) on Mac and something activates the mic(i.e. you Shazam a song), the sound will be interrupted momentarily and will return in very low quality. This is happening because Bluetooth can't handle both way high quality streaming and the bandwidth is decreased to make it work.
It's a known issue and here's what Apple recommends to fix it: https://support.apple.com/en-hk/102217
Most of the time(unless you are on a Mac Mini/Studio/Pro), you have much higher quality microphones built in, so in most use cases, you want to hear from your AirPods but be heard from your internal microphone, which means if every time you connect your AirPods and go into the settings and set the default input device as the internal mic, you won't have sound quality degradation on mic activation, and if you use your mic to talk to people or record something, you will have better sound quality too.
Based on this observation, first I tried to create a script or some automation that can do it for me but found out that it can be clunky or needlessly complex.
Here's someone who used this approach to fix this issue: https://www.dermitch.de/post/macos-force-microphone-when-usi...
Anyway, I decided to take the "build your app for that" route and created this app and called it CrystalClear Audio which doesn't involve any technical setup to use. Making it was also not as easy I hoped, I was expecting this to be a half an hour project but ended up filing bug reports with Apple because some API wasn't behaving as expected or mysterious things were happening when using it(like phantom device changes).
After spending that much time with all this, I decided to publish it on Mac AppStore and after too many rejections(all my mistakes) I got it published: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/crystalclear-sound/id669572374...
The app is not free but comes with a free trial. I decided to go with a very cheap subscription model because I suspect further development might be needed as bugs emerge or API behavior changes. I know its a hated business model but IMHO it's better than ads or tracking of any sort to justify the work done. It's not free because supporting a free app is just as hard as supporting a paid one and it's not one time payment because I don't know what would the right price be for supporting an app for years to come and still have people willing to pay for it.
I hope other people find this useful and if you do, you can support by upvoting on Producthunt so even more people can find it sueful: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/crystalclear-sound
PS: the app is also useful for quickly switching between giving the sound out of the laptop speakers and the headphones, I ended up using that quite often.
It's not a company unto itself -- you can't do subscription, do $3.99. There has to be some sheen of continued value generation on the producer side beyond maintenance and bug fixes to justify a subscription. Here, you're going for an impulse buy.
I highly recommend cutting down the word count for the description.
You want it to be a 10 second no-brainer, open link, read description, realize its well-founded and my $4000 MacBook Pro has a fundamental problem with my $200 headphones that I can solve immediately for ~nothing.
FWIW you lost my attention around here, though there is excess fluff throughout: "Since recently Shazam is built in into macOS and you can access it from the menubar to find songs, even with your AirPods on. It's fantastic, you should use it all the time."
In general, gotta be ruthless and cut everything out that isn't necessary. I don't care A) when Shazam was introduced B) I can use it even with Airpods on C) what you think of it D) what you think of how often I should use it. All you need is "You can hear the bug: with your AirPods on, play a YouTube video, then click Shazam in the macOS menu bar, then stop Shazam and unpause the YouTube video. How does it sound?"
You're not cutting it out because I don't care, you're cutting it out because you have about 10 seconds of attention if you're lucky, and if it runs out, you're done.
Note: I struggle with this 100% of the time :) key to understanding it more was realizing "I don't care" wasn't voiced in an aggressive way, like it would be in conversation. It meant "this was a sentence where I lost attention", and is a license to believe your message is 100% clear, in fact > 100 + x% clear and all you have to do is cut x% and you're optimal. Good position to be in.
reply