My earphones suddenly sound terrible as soon as I open Audition

[d.composed]

Hey, I'm a first time user, (MacBook Pro, OS Mojave) and this may be an obvious or stupid question, although I have a ton of experience with other Adobe products and I've never seen this happen before. I was listening to music as I opened Audition for the first time, and about halfway through the open process, the song I'm listening to suddenly sounds all canned and lo-fi. I thought, well that's weird, and opened one of the tutorial videos and it sounds awful too. I went back to the music, and it still sounded awful. Then I closed Audition and suddenly, voila! it sounds fine again.

I tried a bunch of different combinations and every time, Audition destroys the sound quality of the feed to my earphones. Now, I won't really be able to work on mixing sounds as long as this is a problem. I suspect Audition has taken over my sound settings, but since I'm so new, I don't know how to access that. Can anyone tell me what might be going on?  Thank you!

[Vidya Sagar]

Hi there,

We’re so sorry to hear about the issue with audio. Post a screenshot of Audition Preferences > Audio Hardware.

FAQ: How do I capture and post a screen shot or video?

Please check if you are facing the same issue with Macbook internal speakers.

Thanks,

Vidya

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Yes, this is very likely to be Audition taking control of your sound device, but I must say that I'm not that surprised that this happens if you are actually listening to something during the opening process - that's generally not the way anybody would normally use Audition. Normally you'd open Audition, and then open the file you wanted to listen to it in that. Does it sound okay if you try doing this?

[Shivangi_Gupta]

Hi d.composed,

Are you still facing this issue? If yes, then we'll need to check which earphone are you using?

We'd have to try and replicate the issue at our end.

Thanks,

Shivangi

[d.composed]

Hi thanks for your responses!

It turns out that Audition by default used my earphones as a microphone as well. Once i went into preferences->audio hardware, the problem disappeared right away.

It is solved- on to new unforeseen problems.

Daniel

[Joe Byrnes]

Hi,

I have been struggling with exaclty the same problem for months. Can I ask exactly what settings you changed please?

My headphones are Sony WH-XB900N fwiw

Many thnaks!

Joe

[Osvany25385946vrqb]

Make sure your default input is set to your computers mic or else, but not your headphones.

[awshaffer]

I had the same issue, the audio was awful and static-y with my bluetooth headphones. Tried turning off noise-canceling, nothing. I played it without headphones (computer's built-in speakers), and the audio was fine. I was able to fix the issue by going into Audio Hardware settings and changing Default Input to No Input.

Noise went away. Only thing is now the audio is playing mono in the left ear, can't figure out why it switches.

[awshaffer]

Update on no audio in right ear: I was able to fix this by going into Preferences > Audio Channel Mapping and updating the right ear device channel.