man jesus christ why is apples audio API so bad
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"hello, for important reasons, we need the raw audio stream from the microphone, with as little processing as possible" "yeah unfortunately that is just entirely impossible to do sorry. you can ask the user to set it to that though if you want :)"
though I am not a PM, maybe I'll try to push for us to add a little "hey your audio quality might be dogshit because you have the mac os audio processing thing that *we literally cannot turn off apparently* on in addition to our thing so we turned ours off for you so you only have the mac OS one that is much worse than ours active so please fix that which, again, is due to their extremely bad api design that we cannot do anything about" function and banner so that we at least do not cascade (or maybe we do cascade and just show the banner)
but I suspect there isn't a way to word this that doesn't confuse users
or maybe we can talk to someone at apple. hey, anyone here who works at #apple ? please give people a way to turn your mic processing modes off thanks. or maybe if our audio acquisition people are wrong and actually it *can* be turned off programatically, I take everything back.
note: "off" here means the thing apple have decided to call "wide spectrum" because the naming of the processing modes is also bad, what apple calls "standard" means "with noise suppression", while what apple calls "voice isolation" means "also with noise suppression but a little more and it doesn't *actually* isolate anyones voice it just noise suppresses a little more". though I think "wide spectrum" also still includes echo cancellation. we'd like that off, too, ideally. really, just, raw mode. that's what we'd like.
@halcy CoreAudio is still the best audio API I know of so it's very Apple to develop the most technically sound product in a class in the 00s and then by the 20s they've ruined it via policy decisions and policy decisions alone
@mcc all I know of is we keep having issues on Mac OS because users understandably do not know that if they turn on the "voice isolation" mic mode and then also turn on any of our softwares noise suppression (which, incidentally, often works better than what apple has built into the OS, or at the very least has more features) then you get two noise suppression / echo cancellation systems in a row and that usually makes the audio quality go to shit
windows just lets you open a mic in raw mode (which also sometimes still includes processing because hardware manufacturers and people who make audio drivers are bastards who cannot be trusted) but is at least *supposed* to be actually close to raw-ish, but *to the best of my knowledge* on mac OS there just isn't such a feature (nor in browsers, but browser audio is a whole Bonus Mess anyways and for "its a browser" reason will probably just always be worse)
