Critical Audio Issue on iOS

Hi all!
We (and our customers) discovered that there’s a problem with the sound on newer iOS versions (14.6 and later). After some minutes the music, voice-overs and other sounds become distorted and aren’t played correctly anymore.
The issue is NOT present on iOS 14.0 but is really noticeable on 14.6 and upwards.
In some of our bigger projects the sound even gets cancelled out completely.
As an example you can open the basic audio scene on iOS 14.6 or 14.7 and listen for static crackles and pops (it’s rather subtle but existing in this project, it’s really apparent in projects with music and several audio sources): Basic Audio | Learn PlayCanvas

If someone else has this issue and can direct us in any direction of a fix, please feel free to chime in. Thanks!

I’ve seen the issue but I don’t have a fix.

https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/issues/2866

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Thanks, it really seems like an Apple issue then.

In some projects we can disable positional sound, it looks like the error doesn’t occur if it’s not enabled. Still, Apple will have to fix this…

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[quote=“stan, post:1, topic:21464, full:true”]
Hi all!
We (and our customers) discovered that there’s a problem with the sound on newer iOS versions (14.6 and later). After some minutes the music, voice-overs, and other sounds become distorted and aren’t played correctly anymore.
The issue is NOT present on iOS 14.0 but is really noticeable on 14.6 and upwards.
In some of our bigger projects, the sound even gets canceled out completely.
As an example, you can open the basic audio scene on iOS 14.6 or 14.7 and listen for static crackles and pops (it’s rather subtle but existing in this project, it’s really apparent in projects with music and several audio sources): PlayCanvas Developer Resources | Learn PlayCanvas

At the moment, positional sound has issues on many of the browsers and bugs have been reported in both WebKit and Chromium. The current workaround is to not positional audio unfortunately .

Please see the latest comments on the GitHub repo https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/issues/2866#issuecomment-860924521

Is this still the best solution? I love the ambience and narrative dynamics of positional audio but it’s not worth it if it causes these issues.

Unfortunately, the issue is in the browser rather than the PlayCanvas engine

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=221334

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