1860447 - Crackling audio while playing audio on YouTube music with MacOS Game Mode

Status: NEW

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect)

Description

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start Firefox, load YouTube music, start playing a song.
2. Load a game. I was playing Factorio and sitting on the menu screen, which is not particularly intensive. A little notification popped up saying that it was going into Game Mode, which I think is a new feature on MacOS 14 that prioritizes a game in the foreground.
3. The music being played by Firefox periodically becomes very crackly. The easiest way to trigger this is to adjust the OS volume slider using the dedicated keys, but it seemed to happen other times while I was playing the game.

This is MacOS Sonoma 14.0, on an M1 Pro. Nightly 120.0a1 (2023-10-21) (64-bit).

Here's a profile I collected in media mode. I had to tab out from the game to the browser, enable the profiler, then tab back to the game, adjust the volume up and down to get the crackling, then tab back to the browser and turn off the profiler. I'm assuming the part with the crackling is that part in the middle that looks very different.

I've also tried this with playing a regular YouTube video in a background tab, and the audio doesn't get quite as crackly, but it is definitely affected.

On Chrome, I have no issues at all like this.

I last played this game a few months ago, before I had 14.0 installed, and didn't have this issue, so I'm guessing that it is Game Mode causing problems.

Comment 1

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

If I manually turn off Game Mode, then the crackling issue does not occur and the CPU lines in the profiler look mostly solid with a few tiny gaps (instead of being mostly gaps like in the bad profile).