The Problem

So I was watching kitze’s latest video on why you shouldn’t build in public maybe on Safari and my Airpods Pro 2 make the same stuttering / chopping sound with the audio and video falling out of sync, as it always has, every so often. The behaviour repeats often consistently. I thought, “what the hell?” Apple should just really solve this with the Airpods Pro 2. So I go ahead and turn bluetooth on and off, which is known and has been proven (n=1 sample size) to solve this issue.

raycast-toggle-bluetooth

And somehow it did not. I thought, “what the hell?” again and I disconnected and reconnected my airpods pro 2 again. That trick has also proven to solve this issue.

After multiple retries and finishing my food, I came back to my table and I dug deeper. The last time I tried looking for a solution to this problem, I found this thread: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/434829/bluetooth-audio-is-choppy-stuttering and this is where I got the idea from to toggle bluetooth state or toggle the connection to my airpods pro 2.

Unlike the thread suggests, I am connected to two bluetooth devices simultaneously at max:

macos-bluetooth-airpods-pro-2

The second being my magic trackpad.

This time though, I moved the laptop to in front of me and I tried my girlfriend’s Airpods Max - which had the same issue!

The Solution

I tried another browser - Firefox via Zen Browser - watched the whole video again, and nope, nada, zilch, zero stuttering. All variables remained the same.

On a quick search about “safari youtube audio stuttering,” I found:

I tried again with Safari on a new profile with:

  • 0 extensions
  • Content blockers off

But I can still reproduce the problem.

I tried recording the stuttering on OBS for this post but as soon as I hit “start recording,” on OBS, the problem disappeared; likely due to the airpods pro 2 switching to the HFP profile.

Along with Safari’s annoying behaviour during meetings and now this, it might be time to start looking for a new browser.

Filed under coming-soon Apple Software is Frustrating to Use.