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How best to handle AirPods audio glitches in Game Mode?
Hello! The new lower latency support for AirPods in Game Mode is impressive, but I'm not sure of the best way to handle the transition into/out of Game Mode while audio is playing. In order to lower the latency, the system appears to drop some number of samples, with the result being a good deal less latency. My use case is macOS where it's easier to switch in/out of the fullscreen game (a simple swipe left), thus causing more issues for Game Mode since the audio is playing the entire time. It would be nice if offscreen games could remain in game mode, but I understand not wanting to give developers that control. Are there any best practices for avoiding or masking the audio glitch caused by this skip-ahead? Is there a system event I can receive to know when Game Mode is about to be enabled or disabled, where I could perhaps fade out the audio? My callback checks the inTimestamp->mSampleTime value to detect gaps, but it only rarely detects a Game Mode gap, even though the audio skip-ahead always happens. BTW, I am currently only developing on macOS (15.0) and I'm working at a low level with AudioUnit callbacks and a SpatialMixer. I am not currently using any higher-level audio APIs. And here's a few questions I don't necessarily expect answers to, but it doesn't hurt to ask: Is there any additional technical details about how this latency reduction works, or exactly how much of a reduction is achieved (or said another way, how many samples are dropped)? How much does this affect AirPods battery life? And finally, is there a way to query the actual latency value? I check the value for kAudioDevicePropertyLatency but it seems to always report 160ms for AirPods. Thanks!
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Sep ’24