Bluetooth headphone only one side working

Hello !

I work on the latest Dorico version, have a macbook and work on bigsur. I use the airpods pro and I also want to say that I know there should be other threads regarding this. The only things I can find on the forum are link of people refering to these threads but when I click them, I’m brought back to the landing page of the forum.

Only one side of my bluetooth headset works. In the device setup I have two airpods listed like so airpods (2). I choose the second since the first never work set it to 48000Hz and only one side works. There is an option for 16000Hz but it’s laggy and sound really bad.

I tried reseting the program, the computer and only the project. I tried switching between devices both in the computer and in Dorico. My headphones work perfectly fine everywhere else either in this computer or in any other devices.

I also have to say that it works about 70% of the time correctly. By that I mean on both sides in dorico. But sometimes like today, it does not want to work on both sides no matter what I do. I’m almosst positive it’s in the software.

Anyone had this issue ?
Thanks :slight_smile:

Is the balance slider for the airpods in the middle? (see screenshots below)

Screenshots

Hi thanks for your response. Yes it is !

I was never able so far to reproduce that issue. Also, my impression was that the left only audio happens only after using AirPods, i.e. when switching back to built-in audio. So you have that issue only with the AirPods not built-in audio, right?
If you have that left only audio again, can you please do “Help > Create Diagnostics Report” and post the corresponding zip file here? Thanks.
However, I have a reproducer for not exactly same but a similar case, where coming from a BlueTooth headset the audio completely stops. We are working on it, and I hope that will also eliminate your issue as well.

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Install LadioCast and BlackHole (free software programs).

Too see where the problem is, I’d suggest the following (to try when only one airpod works):

  1. Set the output of Dorico to “BlackHole 2ch”.
  2. Configure LadioCast like in the GIF below.
  3. Make sure LadioCast is running when you play something in Dorico.
LadioCast GIF

ladio and blackhole

Halfway good news: If I fiddle around enough by switching back and forth device drivers I also sometimes get into the state that audio comes through only the left channel. In that case I can also see that the port mapping in Dorico is broken, that means it is definitely an issue in Dorico.
I’ll fiddle around more and see if I can find a reliable way of getting into that state. Once I have that, it shall not be too difficult to eliminate the bug.

@paq_phil : If you are in that left-only state, go again to the Device Setup dialog, unfold the drop down list of the ASIO drivers and choose the same entry again and close, that will tell Dorico to reload the driver. In my case then that always heals the state and stereo audio will come back. But it might be different with you, I don’t know. I have a set of JBL BT headphones here.

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Hello,

Here is the diagnosticDorico Diagnostics.zip (1.0 MB)

It only happens with the airpods and only in Dorico yes.

Hi,

Actually I tried amost every possible change of Asio driver both in the mac and in Dorico but mostly without luck.
On my end, the problem seems to resolve itself completely randomly after repeating the asio driver reset you told me to do but sometimes it takes only one shot or other times I can spend half an hour doing it without a difference.
I hope the zip package will help you :slight_smile:

Thanks Phil, the diagnostics report just confirm some things for me, but that is also important. In the meantime I even found a reproducer for the issue even without AirPods, which is good, because now we can hunt down the bug.
I wonder though, that it takes so long for you to heal the situation. In my case, it actually takes 2 turns to get stereo back. When I get only left audio, I reassert the driver and get no audio at all, and when I reassert once more it is back to stereo audio. That is not the case with you?

Hi !
Thanks again for your response
No it will usually change nothing until it randomly resolves itself.
As an aside I just plugged in my Scarlett 18i20 Which worked perfectly yesterday but it now has the same problem. Only left side.

Same exact symptoms as with the airpods.

Here is a diagnostic with the scarlett driver on Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.1 MB)

That’s strange. Do you use the Scarlett regularly or just now for testing?

I also have another request: If you go to the “Audio MIDI Setup” utility, you can create an aggregated device in there. Please create a new aggregated device in there, but only let the stereo output ports of the AirPads participate in it. Nothing else, and no input ports.
Once you did that, restart Dorico and you should see that new aggregated device in the list of ASIO drivers. When choosing that aggregated device, do you still get that only-left problem?

Hi

No the scarlett is used on the daily whenever my laptop is docked.

I tried exactly what you said but still the left problem. I than tried to agregate both airpods than it suddently worked both on the airpods and on the scarlett driver. BUT I tought hey let see if this is a fix or a random occurence. So I restarted Dorico and left problem is back. Now trying to agregate both airpods than selecting it in dorico make the software crash (I tried 5 times), agregating only one of them (The one with in outputs like you said) does not resolve anything and the scarlett driver is also only left.

Quite a puzzle !

Hm, very puzzling. You are the first one to have so massive problems with this. Others before had this only occasionally, but you constantly and with any device. I am pretty much out of steam in your case.
Tomorrow I will have a debug session with another developer, lets see what we can find out. If it becomes clearer on the conditions, we might also find a temporary workaround for you. A little patience please. Thanks

Perfectly fine !

Thanks for the follow up

Hey !

Just wanted to do a little follow up

I tried this thing I found on the forum but it did not work I just get no audio. Not to worry I copied the project so I lost nothing.

  1. Quit Dorico.
  2. Find the affected project in the Finder or in Windows Explorer.
  3. Make a copy of the affected project so that you’re not tinkering with the original.
  4. Change the file extension of the project from .dorico to .zip. Confirm that you want to do this when the operating system asks you whether you’re sure.
  5. Unzip the zip archive: on Mac, you can simply double-click it; on Windows (which I don’t have access to right now) I believe you can right-click and choose to uncompress a compressed folder.
  6. Go into the folder that has been created: it will contain four items, one of which is a folder called supplementary_data. Go inside this folder.
  7. Delete the vstaudioengine folder from inside the supplementary_data folder.
  8. Now go back to the folder that contains four items (e.g. score.dtn, scorelibrary.dtn, etc.), but NOT the parent folder, i.e. the folder that contains these four items.
  9. Select these four items (again, NOT by selecting the folder that contains these four items), right-click and choose to archive (Mac) or compress (Windows) them.
  10. A new zip archive called something like archive.zip will be created. Change the filename and the extension from .zip to .dorico.
  11. Now open up your fixed project in Dorico and see how it does. Maybe you have to first go to Play Mode and choose Play > Playback Template again in order to load the default sounds again.

But that said in the process I found out that it seems to be project bound. Some other project work fine.

Hello very sorry to bombard you with all these responses but discovering that it was project bound, I went into time machine and just restored the file from yesterday when it all worked. Seems like the files corrupt over time.

Works for now. Still strange. But thanks anyway for the help and ring me if you need other diagnostic or else.

Don’t worry. Actually, that recipe that you cited once came from me. It actually doesn’t work anymore, because the audio engine data format evolved over time. I still know how to fix it, but it needs a little deeper knowledge that I can’t easily explain. If you have other projects that you can’t recover via time machine, send them to me and I’ll fix them.
But again, this whole thing shall not happen in first place. But I hope we have a proper fix for it in the software soon.

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Hi everyone, I’m glad to announce that this bug shall not bother us anymore in the future.
Finally we have a fix for it which will become available in the Dorico 4 version.
One good thing additionally is, if you have a project saved with a left-only mapping, that will automatically heal itself during project loading, so no need anymore to fiddle around in the project data.
Until Dorico 4 is out, please don’t hesitate to contact me should you have projects where sound only comes through the left channel. I’ll repair it for you.

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