Audio Ducking Not Working on iOS 18.1

By Nicholas Stanford, 30 October, 2024

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I updated to the official release of 18.1 on my iPhone 14 Pro yesterday, and audio ducking stopped working. It doesn't matter what I set it to, either "When Speaking" or "Always." No effect at all.
The experience with this update has been one of my most buggy iOS experiences in a while. Like not iOS 18 but specifically the 18.1 update. My phone will weirdly forget that I was listening to an audiobook in Audible after I pause it and when I hit play/pause on my AirPods it will start playing whatever song I was last listening to in Music. I also found that VoiceOver was somehow accessing my home screen while my phone was locked, which feels like a pretty major security issue.
Slightly off topic but this strikes me as weird because the simultaneously released macOS Sequoia 15.1 mostly fixes bugs that I was experiencing.

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Comments

By Brian on Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 19:13

Do this exactly:
1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Audio.
2. Tap on Audio Docking.
3. Set it to either "While Speaking", or "Always".
4. Navigate further to the right on the same screen as above, and adjust the volume to anything, "over", 100%.
5. Audio Docking should now be working.

This has been posted elsewhere on AppleVis concerning the Docking volume issue, including this thread:
https://applevis.com/blog/apple-releases-ios-181-ipados-181-bringing-new-bugs-some-fixes-voiceover-braille-users

By Nicholas Stanford on Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 19:13

Sorry about that. I looked for a forum thread but I didn't think to check the blog. Do you have any idea what the default volume setting for this is? I didn't realize they added the ability to adjust that at some point, and I've always been pretty happy with the out of the box experience for audio ducking. The update put the stupid thing all the way down to 80 percent for me, so it wasn't ducking at all. I have to go above 150 percent before I can really hear a difference so I'm guessing the default is somewhere around 180 percent but none of it sounds quite right.

By kool_turk on Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 19:13

They decided to set mine to 50%, so I had to go in and set it back to what I have it set to, and that is 150%.

That's what mine is set to as my personal preference, but your preference might be different.

By Brian on Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 19:13

I have mine set to 130%. This means that VO will be 30% louder than all other non-VO volume.

HTH.

By Joshua on Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 19:13

That is what i have mine set to, it was set to 90% when i updated

Apple stop changing settings, this isnt cool

By Ekaj on Thursday, October 31, 2024 - 19:13

I haven't yet listened to the episode linked here, but I did briefly check out the enhanced Audio Ducking. This is only an observation, but as somebody who now wears hearing aids I think the reason Apple did this was to accommodate different forms of hearing loss. I haven't yet tested this out with my hearing aids, because my father and I exchanged one for the other yesterday at Costco. There was a small glitch in the brand/model of hearing aids which I have, and rather than go without either of them I chose to have one repaired at a time. This was a company recall. But once I have them both again I'll test out the new Audio Ducking. Btw, this was a small glitch and I am staying with this particular brand because they seem to be doing a wonderful job.

By Aidan JK on Thursday, October 31, 2024 - 19:13

The way they have changed this makes no sense at all. It means to benefit from any audio ducking at all, you have to have your VoiceOver volume set to over 100%. That is really loud! It’s only after 100% that the volume of the voice doesn’t increase when you increase the percentage. Instead, to give users more control, there should be a separate setting to control the extent to which other audio is reduced when it ducks.

By Brian on Thursday, October 31, 2024 - 19:13

That’s not exactly correct. Don’t let the percentage numbers mislead you. If you have your media volume set to a reasonable volume, your docking volume will only be the percentage, that is above 100%, “of your set media volume”. That is to say, it will not be very loud at all, unless you blast your media volume, that is. 🎧😵‍💫

By Dennis Long on Thursday, October 31, 2024 - 19:13

I Think once apple did an excellent job of listening to its users. If you listen to Thomas's podcast you will understand it.

By Nicholas Stanford on Friday, November 1, 2024 - 19:13

I appreciate the advice. 180 percent feels pretty close to the former amount of ducking I would get prior to iOS 18. I wish I knew the exact percentage of the system default, but I'm not willing to restore system defaults to find it out.