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What took so long for Asahi Linux to finally support microphones on MacBooks? In a nutshell, recent Macs have some of the best sounding microphones available on a laptop… when you're running macOS. But because of the way Apple designed its laptops, it takes a mix of hardware and software to deliver the "Studio-quality" the company promises.
As the Asahi team explains, recent MacBooks have three Pulse Density Modulation microphones that are normally "very omnidirectional and very sensitive." In other words, they pick up all the sound near a laptop and not just the audio of the person sitting in front of the computer. And that's a recipe for very noisy Zoom calls, among other things.
Apple gets around this by using "beamforming" technology to ensure that the mic only picks up the sound it's supposed to. But there was no Linux tool to do that until Asahi developer James Calligeros figured out how to create an open source beamformer for Apple MacBooks. It's called Triforce.
Calligeros notes that "this is an attempt at a beamformer armed only with first year undergrad level engineering maths and some vague idea of the principles gleaned from various webpages and PDFs," so it's unlikely to match the audio quality you'd get while running macOS. But it's good enough to make the microphones usable when running Linux on a MacBook with an M series processor.
What took so long for Asahi Linux to finally support microphones on MacBooks? In a nutshell, recent Macs have some of the best sounding microphones available on a laptop… when you're running macOS. But because of the way Apple designed its laptops, it takes a mix of hardware and software to deliver the "Studio-quality" the company promises.
As the Asahi team explains, recent MacBooks have three Pulse Density Modulation microphones that are normally "very omnidirectional and very sensitive." In other words, they pick up all the sound near a laptop and not just the audio of the person sitting in front of the computer. And that's a recipe for very noisy Zoom calls, among other things.
Apple gets around this by using "beamforming" technology to ensure that the mic only picks up the sound it's supposed to. But there was no Linux tool to do that until Asahi developer James Calligeros figured out how to create an open source beamformer for Apple MacBooks. It's called Triforce.
Calligeros notes that "this is an attempt at a beamformer armed only with first year undergrad level engineering maths and some vague idea of the principles gleaned from various webpages and PDFs," so it's unlikely to match the audio quality you'd get while running macOS. But it's good enough to make the microphones usable when running Linux on a MacBook with an M series processor.
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