“Inmy teen years, Itrained as a concert pianist. So I’ma little picky when it comes to key action”

My 2019 MacBook Pro has an interesting glitch. When playing audio, especially from a video-streaming service such as YouTube, there’s an occasional loud crack glitch sound. Then the audio resumes. It’s been doing it for a while, and I still use this 2019 Core i9 MacBook Pro for daily hacking work (I’m keeping the 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max laptop fairly clean, focused on a smaller range of specific tasks).

A web search showed a slew of issues, both with the internal speakers and with external audio devices connected via USB. Many point their fingers at the T2 security chip within the laptop, but who knows? The only solution appears to be to take it back to Apple to get a replacement motherboard, and even then this isn’t a guaranteed solution. As a brief aside, I’m tempted to take mine back to the store before the warranty runs out; the battery capacity is down from the original 8,790mAh to 7,555mAh. This is on a battery with 141 cycles that was manufactured on 16 May 2020, according to the tools in iStat Menus.

Anyway, in the meantime I’ve found a workaround. It might not be a full fix, because its too early to tell, but it has certainly reduced the number of “crackzzzzz” blasts from the speakers when playing YouTube videos. Go to the Applications | Utilities folder and run the Audio MIDI Setup app. You might think this is only about MIDI, but it has a broader set of capabilities. The default setting for the MacBook Pro speakers is set to a sample rate of 44,100Hz (the same