With macOS 27 did Apple improve the behavior for managing audio source priority and audio selection?
ASKED BY · Craig McFarlane · BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS · 26 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:22:41
Apple's automatic device switching is helpful for most users but annoying for professionals with multiple audio devices. After dismissing Bluetooth device prompts a few times, the OS learns and stops asking.
No documented improvements found. Audio Priority Bar is an open-source tool that helps rank audio inputs. Manually selecting audio interfaces and not relying on automatic switching is the more reliable approach.
Don't trust automatic settings. Manually select your audio interface and it will remember the choice in Zoom. This avoids the problem of the system randomly picking outputs.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
22:23I thought it looked really sharp. That was the only phone that I ever owned that was white. All right, let's go to the next question, Bill. Next question comes in from Craig McFarlane in Boston, Massachusetts. with Mac OS 27. Did Apple improve the behavior for managing audio source priority and audio selection? And he has noticed that alone would get me to switch.
22:46Yeah, you could, you know, you'd have to get me at gunpoint to be able to switch to a new operating system that is untested and unproven. Go ahead, Craig. Yeah, so like a lot of people, there's things I love about Apple and there's things that just drive me crazy. And the whole nonsense of, and I appreciate somebody plugs in a mic and it auto switches to that, you know, for probably 60 or 70% of the population, that's a handy, cool thing.
23:18It's like, oh, great. Now it's selected. For those of us that have multiple inputs and multiple outputs, I would love to just be able to rank them. I've got a bunch of monitors. and randomly Zoom or Teams or some other thing will just start piping it because it randomly picked out of the list. And if I can't prioritize, it's just, it makes, it grinds me on a daily basis.
23:51So I see there's a audio priority bar that is an open source tool that covers that. So I'm actually going to give that a try. But I was hoping it was fixed in the OS. Looking up through Google, it doesn't seem like they made a change. So what kind of what kind of problems have you had? Because I don't I mean, I've I don't recall having very many problems with
24:14you're talking about setting the default input and output for the audio interface that or whatever you're using in that computer. Is that what you're talking about? Correct. Okay. Yeah. So I don't like ever leaving things on any kind of automatic setting. So for me, the first thing I do on Mac OS and Windows, the first thing I do is just immediately select the interface that I want.
24:38Now, I've had, for me, even disconnecting and reconnecting USB interfaces like that, I've never had an issue with it just go back to the internal interface on the computer. So for me, that's worked really well. But, yeah, I don't trust things to try to make decisions for me typically. So I like manually setting that stuff, and that's worked pretty well. Even inside of Zoom, I just always go manually select that interface, and it always seems to remember it.
25:08Go ahead, Bill. Yeah, that's one of the things that Apple tends to do. And I think for a lot of their customers, the fact that you've plugged in a mic, you know, there is a huge number of people. Because you plugged it in now, you probably want to use it now. So they default to that. I got to tell you, it's been annoying me lately because after the last OS update I did, suddenly it's telling me when I'm sitting here, you have different Bluetooth devices.
25:34Do you want to hook up this one? Do you want to hook up that one? And it's like trying to get ahead of the decision that he thinks I want to make, but I don't really want to make it. So one of the things I have noticed, though, is that after two or three times when I say no, suddenly it will give me a, okay, you really don't want to do this because let's shut it off.
25:52And I just think they're continually trying to put a certain amount of intelligence. And until I figure out how they're implementing that, it drives me nuts. And then it usually goes away. I'm not saying it's not an annoyance when they first pull one of these things. But a few of those, to me, have been persistent enough to bother me for a long time.
26:11Your mileage may vary. Yeah. I know Apple intelligence is integrated into macOS in a much deeper way in macOS 27. So obviously now they have Gemini or a customized version of Gemini as a model. But I don't think what we need is like the last thing I would want is Apple intelligence, like making suggestions, like kind of like Clippy in Microsoft Office.
26:35Like, hey, I noticed you're trying to connect this interface. Would you like me to help you? No, I don't need that. Thank you. All right. Next up. Henry Ramos in Yonkers, New York comes up next. So many folks making apps with AI now for production. Anyone seen anything truly useful? Go ahead, Tony. So I made a quick list. Chris Sabato, Ken Jordan, John Wallace, Rabbi David Paskin, Lord Zoom, John Drinkwater, and Beta, I want to say Alpha tester, Tony Mobley, is working on something.
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