I’ve been reading through various Xten support forum posts on the topic of audio quality (or lack thereof) in the X-Lite client for Mac OS X. I am by nature a tinkerer and just had to find out what all of the advanced options do… and I seem to have hit on a workaround.

Try this out:

Advanced System Settings > Audio Settings > Force Microphone KHz Rate: 8000 Hz

The idea for this came from a post that essentially blamed Apple for the poor quality. The claim was that the Core Audio interface only allowed 44.1 KHz native sampling, and since the software had to downsample to 8 KHz as required for the codecs, this was the likely source of the pops, clicks, and buzzes. Naturally, when I chanced upon the advanced setting above, I attempted to force it to the ideal sampling rate – and amazingly, it worked! I don’t know what this does internally; perhaps it tells Core Audio to do the downsampling, or perhaps it actually changes the hardware sample rate. However it’s done, though, it works.

Now all I have to do is set up a call with someone else to really test this out. The output audio dropout problem is still there, but that’s apparently fixed with the next public release.

Time to sleep…