1475145 - FF 61.0.1 Mac: Audio plays out of wrong channels of external audio interface (ignoring driver and system prefs)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Audio/Video: cubeb, defect, P3)

Description

[Zach Poff]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Build ID: 20180605171542

Steps to reproduce:

- Plug in MOTU Ultralite audio interface.
- Setup MOTU driver so the "main outs" are sent over SPDIF digital outs instead of default analog outs.
- In Mac System prefs, select the MOTU interface as the default sound output device
- Open Firefox 61.0.1 and play any web-based audio
(Mac OS 10.13.5 "High Sierra")


Actual results:

Sound plays from the analog outs instead of SPDIF outs. I tried restarting, changing the order of selecting the steps above, refreshing FF, making a new profile. No change.


Expected results:

Sound should play from SPDIF digital outputs, as directed by the audio driver and system prefs. All previous versions of FF have worked as expected, and other browsers and applications do too. I downgraded to 60.0.2 and the problem was instantly resolved.

Comment 1

[Zach Poff]

(I downgraded the browser before filing this bug, so pardon the user agent!)

Comment 2

[Jean-Yves Avenard [:jya]]

:padenot this looks similar to what your audio card would allow. Is this something you could try reproducing?


OP, could you test again with Firefox Nightly? Thank you

Comment 3

[Zach Poff]

Unfortunately the problem persists in the current nightly 63.0a1. If there's more I can do (to better describe the problem or test solutions) I'm happy to do it. Many thanks.

Comment 4

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

I don't have access to it until next Monday, sorry.

I think it would be worth it to check what we were doing before, and how to do it with the current setup.

Comment 5

[Kenneth Falck]

I have the same problem in Firefox 64.0 on MacOS Mojave, using 18-channel Roland MX-1 as audio output (channels 17 and 18 are the stereo outputs I have configured in Mac audio settings). This is how Firefox sees the device:

      {
        "name": "MX-1",
        "groupId": "jp_co_roland_RDUSB01A3Dev_AudioEngine:00311000:0",
        "vendor": "Roland",
        "type": 2,
        "state": 2,
        "preferred": 15,
        "supportedFormat": 12336,
        "defaultFormat": 4096,
        "maxChannels": 18,
        "defaultRate": 96000,
        "maxRate": 96000,
        "minRate": 96000,
        "maxLatency": 4106,
        "minLatency": 39
      },

It seems that Firefox ignores the system audio setting and outputs only to channels 1 and 2. When using a 2-channel audio device it works fine.

Comment 6

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

The solution for this will have the same shape as bug 1434362 I think.

Comment 7

[matthiasheckmann]

Experiencing the same bug still on
Mac OS 10.13.6 (17G5019)
Firefox 66.0 (64-bit)

firefox not honoring the system wide default audio output channels.
instead simply playing on system default audio device on channel 1/2

Definitely a limitation thats critical for certain users.

Please let me know if i can assist in any way.
Happy to volunteer!

Comment 8

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Can people here try again in a Nightly build? We've made some modifications recently that has fixed similar problems for other people, that had opened other bugs about this.

Comment 9

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

We've fixed a similar problem: bug 1552928 on Mac OSX. Please try nightly build

Comment 10

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Marking this as fixed, as we've had more than a few reports of people saying that this is now fixed (for now in Nightly, but soon in release, in a few weeks).

Comment 11

[yakuba42]

Hi,
I'm still having the issue using 74.0 with my Motu.
Am I missing something?
Thanks,
Jacob

Comment 12

[yakuba42]

Also just tried it with current Nightly: firefox-76.0a1.en-US.mac.
Same issue.
Thanks for any help!
Jacob

Comment 13

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Jacob, which MOTU interface are you using, that does the wrong thing?

Do you have your default stereo pair output on something else than channel 1 and 2, and do you still see the audio coming from channel 1 and 2 ?

Thanks!

Comment 14

[yakuba42]

I have the firewire 400 version of Motu 828 mkii.
See the various screen grabs in this PDF that I made for the people at Rogue (Airfoil only hears Main Outs):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h69uguo5pumoxig/Airfoil%20with%20MOTU%20828mkii.pdf?dl=0
I think because I use the Motu for surround output as well, something is buggy perhaps in the Audio Devices app.
I can't for example, make "Surround 2.0" set to Main Outs 1/2. The Front L/R remains on the setting chosen for 5.1 output.
What's also baffling is that this isn't just Firefox. When I play an audio finder from the finder level (by pressing the space bar), audio comes out Analog 7/8 just like Firefox. Same for Safari.
Chrome meanwhile, performs as it should. So does Spotify.
Appreciate any thought you have, Paul!
Jacob

Comment 15

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Quite puzzling, thank you for the document. This sound-card might a bit hard to find and expensive to get to debug this, so we might need to ask you to run a few tests for us so we can try to understand what's up and ultimately fix this.

Chun-min, do you think (looking at the PDF from Jacob above https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1475145#c14) that cubeb could be confused by the 2.0 surround? Do we check for 2.0 stereo explicitly maybe?

Comment 16

[yakuba42]

Cool, thanks for your reply Paul. Stoked you're interested.
Let me know in whatever way I can help with tests move this downfield.

Comment 17

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

Jacob,

I've opened bug 1627827 to track this issue for

can you open the terminal and type the following command to launch the Firefox Nightly?

 MOZ_LOG="cubeb:5" /Applications/Firefox\ Nightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin

It should give us a log about what the device channel layout caught by Firefox. You may see a lot of info like

[Child xxx: MediaDecoderStateMachine #x]: E/cubeb /builds/worker/checkouts/gecko/third_party/rust/cubeb-coreaudio/src/backend/mod.rs:2678: (0x123456789) Output audiounit init with device 123 successfully.

The device layout info will be logged when the input source has a different layout from the output device(input source is audio 5.1 but the device is stereo), or the input source's channel requirement is different from the channel count provided by your device(e.g., the input source is 2-channel audio but the device has 10 channels). I think the latter case meets your needs. You can open any 2-channel audio with the Motu 828 mkii. That should give us the log about the device-channel layout we got in Firefox.

When you launch the Firefox and get the log, can you paste the log to bug 1627827?