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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

You may find value in this Mac app that disables the microphone input channel on AirPods as part of pairing them, which should in theory permanently resolve your issue:

https://c-command.com/toothfairy/

(Note that I neither know how they’re doing it nor have I tried to reverse engineer it. Works well for me in non-VMWare scenarios!)

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That’s great! This kind of app is priced perfectly for what it does. I’m going to give it a try this week, thanks for the rec!

I use an external microphone anyways, so on my Mac I never use the AirPods as an input. I do on the iPhone and iPad, but not on the Mac.

I have Toothfairy and it is amazing as a quicker way to connect my AirPods to my Mac, but I've tried that option for disabling input and it didn't seem to work for me unfortunately. Still absolutely worth the $3 for the other features though.

The only time I’ve seen the input switching not work is if there’s another app that keeps forcibly changing the input back to the AirPods. Some games and virtual environments do that. If you contact toothfairy@c-command.com, I can look into what the issue might be on your Mac.

I do the same thing I think, but with Hammerspoon. The script I’m using in Hammerspoon automatically switches the Input Device back to Internal Microphone when a BT device is connected. Solves the issue for all BT devices w/speakers + mic. I haven’t used it, but I’m guessing ToothFairy does the same thing, although maybe it has some more bells and whistles.

+1 for Tooth fairy. I use it to quickly switch between multiple different Bluetooth headsets when at work

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