Qlab on Monterey and the orange dot

[Andy Dolph]

I'm using Qlab and ZoomOSC on a new M1 Max MacBook Pro.  the OS seems to put a little orange dot on the menu bar or the upper right corner of screens without a menu bar when an application is using the microphone.

That orange dot is showing up on top of the video Qlab is outputting - so everything I'm doing during this Zoom show has an orange dot in the upper corner of the screen I'm sending Qlab content too.

Is there a way to fix that?

Thanks!

Andy

[micpool]

The 'mic in use dot' is part of control centre and is not a customisable option so for the moment  I think you are stuck with it. 

It's a stupid feature, even more so when it appears on screens with no menu bar and it's pretty unforgiveable that it doesn't seem to be configureable by any means.

It appears with QLab on any Mac with Monterey whenever a microphone cue is present  in  a workspace. The cue doesn't even have to be running.

It appears when any program using an audio input is frontmost.

Mic

[John Forrister]

For what it's worth, the orange 'in use' dot is a safety/privacy feature.  The theory is that it ensures a microphone connected to the system can't be surreptitiously 

turned on without an indicator explicitly visible to the user (assuming they're looking at a connected monitor).  It's intended to be effectively identical in function to

the LED 'in use' indicators you find on webcams.

From that perspective, it would defeat the purpose of the indicator if there were an option or an easy way to disable it, since if I'm a bad actor, disabling that

function is the very first thing I would do.

Unfortunately, this is a very niche use case where it doesn't make sense.  I wouldn't expect Apple to remove the behavior any time soon, although 

they may opt to refine it.

-John

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[micpool]

On Friday, December 17, 2021 at 5:49:22 PM UTC jo...@segfault.com wrote:

Unfortunately, this is a very niche use case where it doesn't make sense.  I wouldn't expect Apple to remove the behavior any time soon, although 

they may opt to refine it. 

What do you mean by niche case?  It's not just Andy's example of doing a live Zoom show. Every single program used for presentation use suffers from it, whenever an audio input is present. Surely the entire live event industry can't be described as niche, it's going to show up if an audio input is used for LTC, even if you are not routing programme audio through your video playback software. 

Mic

[jtb0...@gmail.com]

It’s not a bug … it’s a feature and you just have to hold it the right way…

Sarcasm aside… having it show up on every single screen shows more of the Apple lack of understanding use cases and customer base. It could easily be limited to screens where the menu bar is present and wouldn’t interfere where someone is projecting a presentation while recording it for example. 

On Dec 17, 2021, at 1:01 PM, micpool <m...@micpool.com> wrote:



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[John Forrister]

That was inelegantly phrased.

With respect to being a niche use case, let me state it's entirely a matter of perspective.

I don't have any particular insight into Apple or their business practices, but with respect to their 

MacOS consumers, their bread and butter right now is home & general business users.  And the majority

of those users aren't going to have an issue with a random orange dot in the corner of a screen.

The live event industry, and similar use cases - while overwhelmingly Mac users, based on 

my (admittedly) limited experience are going to be a relatively small overall percentage of Apple's 

overall user base.

I agree it's annoying.  I just wanted to provide some insight as to why it was designed this way in the first place.

-John

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[jimsta...@zoho.com]

Perhaps use an earlier OS?

Jim

[Andy Dolph]

I doubt I can get an M1 Max MacBook Pro to take an earlier OS. Though I guess I could try.

I’m curious to hear from someone at Figure 53 and their thoughts about how to deal with this, because to my mind it makes Qlab unusable for a pretty wide range of situations on that OS.

On Dec 17, 2021, at 1:46 PM, 'jimsta...@zoho.com' via QLab <ql...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Perhaps use an earlier OS?

Jim

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[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Andy,

I’m afraid I don’t have much new insight to share other than what everyone else has already said. 

I’ve noticed it too, I consider it very problematic, I am assuming Apple wants to make it difficult or impossible to avoid, and I’m not yet sure if we can do much on our end other than complain to them. 

But I’ve filed it and we can certainly update the list if we learn more.

-C

[Rich Walsh]

I've seen this kind of statement a few times in the last 30 years of using Macs, but I've never seen any facts to go along with it. Do you have a breakdown of how Macs are actually used in the wild?

The current Apple website page for the MacBook Pro features what looks like footage of a dance performance, speaks of "up to 7 streams of 8K ProRes video playback" (an odd thing to market at "home & general business"), has a screenshot with the word "Theater" [sic] in it and lists Audio Production and Video Editing as some of its key uses. It seems odd to speak of grading colour "in HDR on 8K 4444 ProRes video" if your market is home users. What use is Final Cut Pro with a client in a production house if every monitor they can watch their content on has an orange dot in the corner?

Similarly, why make and market a £10k+ rackmount Mac Pro (again "Pro") if professional use of the Mac that involves presenting in any form is a "small overall percentage" of your users? What kind of "general business" needs to rackmount their computers? (There are better servers out there than anything Apple have made for years, which they tacitly acknowledged when they dropped the Xserve.) Even audio post production is likely to involve a client looking at a video display driven directly by a Mac for a significant part of the time… Why put video functionality in Logic Pro if the monitor you show it on is going to have an orange dot?

Presumably this even affects Keynote…? Apple have always pushed themselves as being for creatives, and almost all creative work involves presenting to a client in some form – and a lot of that is going to involve them looking at a monitor.

I believe Apple's "bread and butter" is the iPhone: last time I looked at any figures that was the source of most of their profit. I'd be interested to know what _percentage of the live event industry_ is using Macs for direct video projection rather than high end media servers like Hippotizer…

Sorry if that appears belligerent, but I do like to see data when people make sweeping statements – particularly these days!

Rich

[Seablade -]

On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 6:23 AM 'Rich Walsh' via QLab <ql...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Sorry if that appears belligerent, but I do like to see data when people make sweeping statements – particularly these days!

The plural of anecdote is not research, but right now that may be all we have to go on.  So for data to put things in perspective at least:

https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-sold-a-load-more-macs-in-2020-as-its-break-from-intel-paid-off

In that article it mentioned Apple moving 22.6 million units.  Based off context I have to infer this means computers.  Now we have to get into anecdotes sadly unless someone can find other data on the entertainment industry, but lets take the two places I work as a W2 employee.  One is a university, one is a road house that until recently I worked under an IA contract.  In the university, while theater does use Macs for audio especially, and could use it for video projections as well (Though we haven't done so recently) lets just compare the number of those macs compared to the number of macs being used on the production for drafting, pre-vis etc.  We already end up with the production machines as a minority.  That doesn't even count looking at Mac across just the school of the arts as a whole, where they are very much in the majority of users, but very much in the minority of use for this case.

In the road house, I am the only one in production that owns a mac actually.  Yes this is a rarity (Supposedly, another anecdote here) but the point stands.  However the marketing department all uses macs, and none use it for this purpose.  The one production Mac we use is minor, and while I am building a new playback rig currently there, it will be using SDI outputs from a decklink duo, which I believe should work around this issue anyways. And for production companies we bring in for shows, this is fairly standard.  There is one production company we use often that utilizes Playback Pro with direct output from the mac hdmi, but again, software that does strictly playback, likely isn't affected by this as it isn't using the microphone, thus no orange dot, and they do large corporate events for companies like Phillip Morris/Altria, Captial One, etc. quite often so that market likely not bothered, which lets face it, is a large portion of the live event market. Many more entertainment based shows that come in are all SDI based solutions due to needing to run hundreds of feet to the projectors, or video wall processors, etc. anyways, not something done with HDMI in most contexts without converters, and at that point using SDI makes a lot of sense.

One last anecdote, I have multiple clients in my consulting in the area.  The majority don't use macs for anything but production.  The ones that use them for production, guess what, have all moved to SDI based workflows, primarily because I designed it but this happened before this was an issue, and was more because of the move to more professional streaming environments it made sense.

All that anecdote aside, my point being that the usage of macs is far higher in other fields where this is not an issue.  Even in your examples from Apple's website, yes they are marketed for live production as one use of many, but I am willing to bet money that it is far more common for them to be purchased for video editing and content creation than for live event production, just in terms of units sold vs number of live event companies that do projections off their macs without using a direct SDI output solution of some kind.  Or really general desktop use even, as even with the 'content creation' industry I would bet we are still in the minority.  

So in reality, not only are we talking about a tiny slice of pie in terms of numbers of macs sold for live entertainment vs other usage, we are talking about a smaller slice of THAT pie even that is utilizing software that processes live input AND outputs video, and even a smaller slice of THAT that does so without dedicated SDI based outputs.  That is a very small slice of the pie right now.

Would love a solution, don't get me wrong, but it may not be forthcoming from Apple.

       Thomas Vecchione

[micpool]

I think the really important thing here is that anyone that is adversely affected  by the 'Mic in use indicator' on displays with no menu bars should write to Apple feedback and explain why. Please do this before spending too much time in detailed  theoretical debate about Apple's sales metrics which aren't really relevant to the inappropriateness  of this feature  to  users in our industries. I have sent the following:

Hi
The Microphone in use indicator on displays that don't have the menu bar visible is undermining the viability of many pieces of software used for video display in the live events, conference and theatre industries.

Whilst I have no objection to the orange dot appearing in a menu bar, professionals  using Macintosh Computers for video playback must have complete control over what appears on output screens that are visible to audiences, which sometimes may include millions of people for a single event.

The orange dot is as offensive and unacceptable  to these users as it would have been if you had chosen to overlay a watermark  on all display screens with an Apple Logo.

Please provide the means of turning it off as a matter of urgency.

Thanks

Presumably similar feedback from developers who subscribe to Apple's support programs will carry even more weight.

Mic

[Andy Dolph]

I've submitted it, and I'd strongly encourage others to do the same - I think Mic has the right idea here - we need to make it known to Apple that we have a problem.

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[Seablade -]

On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 12:52 PM micpool <m...@micpool.com> wrote:

I think the really important thing here is that anyone that is adversely affected  by the 'Mic in use indicator' on displays with no menu bars should write to Apple feedback and explain why. 

Now that I will agree with.  I am just cynical and don't expect much to come of it;)

   Thomas 

[jimsta...@zoho.com]

Work-arounds for the moment could include cropping the video output with an external device.

Imagepro, Teranex, 220/221, whatever it takes.

Or use a partial screen in QLab and appropriate input settings in the video wall/projector.

Or go back to the previous QLab machine until the on/off option is added.

Jim

[Andy Dolph]

What I'm going to do is go back to Big Sur on machines I can get to take it, and the ones that can't I'll have to divide the Qlab video playback onto a separate machine from Zoom or anything else with an open mic.

I may also try outputting from Qlab to a blackmagic thunderbolt device and then bringing the video back in through a capture box, but I'd hate to make a habit of doing it that way...

Andy

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[Andy Carluccio]

Mark from TroikaTronix is encouraging Isadora users to join the petition:

https://community.troikatronix.com/topic/7723/community-action-must-read-macos-monterey-orange-dot-security-warning-write-apple-now

[m...@stevensokulski.com]

When downgrading isn't possible, consider using a Syphon output rather than a screen share in Zoom. This changes up how the content gets displayed alongside speakers, and removes some flexibility in that regard. But in my experience, the video quality actually goes up.

This can be done from QLab using a surface that is configured to output to Syphon and the Syphon Virtual Webcam application that's available for free from the TrokaTronix website.

This has been my preferred method for much of the past year as it allows me to have greater control of resolution and guarantees that only what I intend to output can ever be sent to the Zoom room.A bit like using a BMD output device in an in-person setting, versus using a traditional display output.

[Andy Dolph]

That’s a great idea - I’ll experiment with it

On Dec 19, 2021, at 7:02 PM, m...@stevensokulski.com <m...@stevensokulski.com> wrote:

When downgrading isn't possible, consider using a Syphon output rather than a screen share in Zoom. This changes up how the content gets displayed alongside speakers, and removes some flexibility in that regard. But in my experience, the video quality actually goes up.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qlab/9c8aa7cb-145d-4784-8ea1-92d632d40b0fn%40googlegroups.com.

[Chris Ashworth]

I have not tried this and I do not endorse it, but this just crossed my radar as well:

https://github.com/s4y/undot 

The real solution will be Apple changing something, though.  

Following Mark’s lead, I would like to encourage everyone to provide feedback to Apple:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html 

To my mind, simply removing the dot from screens that don’t have a menu bar is the obvious move here, although maybe I am missing something.

-C

[John Forrister]

Rich,

You raise some interesting points.  I'm going to selectively include some quotes through the body of this email.  As Seablade 

stated in another note, "the plural of anecdote is not research", but I can speak into research and general business use.

Also, this got very long, and is pretty off topic, so if I offend anyone here, I'll apologize in advance.

A little background on me:  I do live sound and general tech work for a community theatre, unpaid, and certainly not at a pro level.  My day

job is in information security.  I work for a non-profit genetics research institute, and I've been in the infosec industry since 2004, but I've

worked in the internet industry at a global scale since 1996.  So, my observations and opinions are just that:  mine, and mine alone.

I've seen this kind of statement a few times in the last 30 years of using Macs, but I've never seen any facts to go along with it. Do you have a breakdown of how Macs are actually used in the wild?

At my dayjob, we have about 500 users and workstations, with a breakdown of about 50/50 PC/Mac, with most of the researchers running Mac for research, 

bioinformatics work, etc. I won't get into general server infrastructure, other than to say we run a grand total of 1 Mac Mini that's used as a JAMF caching

server and a couple of other mac-specific purposes.

Aside from the AV and Creative industries, Macs are heavily used in the scientific community, and are gaining traction in the general business community as well.

Case in Point:  IBM backs this up:  As of November 2019, their publicly reported numbers indicated that they had 290,000 Macs deployed internally:

https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-research-showing-mac-enables-greater-productivity-and-employee-satisfaction-at-ibm/

As an aside:  My Execs and IT Department like Macs at an institutional level for pretty much the same reasons outlined in the IBM research.

IBM (345k employees) has adopted a company-wide 'user choice' in terms of PC/Mac.  So have a variety of other large companies - I can say for certain that Cisco Systems (77k employees), Amazon (798k employees), Google (140k employees), and Palo Alto Networks (10k employees) have adopted similar user-preference allowances for their users that are allowed to take home computers.  As have many other software companies that offer PC and Mac based versions of their software.

That's ~1.23 million employees across 5 companies. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that 40% of those users - ~492k - have opted to use Mac over PC.  That's 492k Macs across 5 companies, and the percentages appear to be increasing over time.  

Across those companies, very few of those users will be working in any capacity that involves more presentation than what can be done with Powerpoint or Keynote.

Seablade is correct - the 22.6 million units referenced in that article are MacOS devices, and don't include iphone/ipad/etc sales.

Let's say - for the sake of argument - that 200k of those were sold to the companies listed above.  That leaves 22.4 million identified units unaccounted for, but we've only really looked at 5 (large) companies.

Serious question for those professionally in this industry:  How many of those remaining 22.4 million units ended up in the professional audio-visual world  where the orange dot is 

going to have a meaningful impact in the course of day to day business?  My personal inclination is that it's going to be less than 500k, but that is, admittedly, just a guess.

Similarly, why make and market a £10k+ rackmount Mac Pro (again "Pro") if professional use of the Mac that involves presenting in any form is a "small overall percentage" of your users? 

Here, I can pull from my dayjob.

"Presenting", Visual Editing, etc, are easy things for a lay person to visualize, and lend themselves well to advertising efforts in a way that most people can relate to, which is what you want in an effective marketing campaign.  People "know" that Mac's are "good" for audio and video editing, so that's where Apple focuses their efforts.

Whole genome sequencing, tumor/normal sequencing, microbiome analysis, genetic epidemiology, protein folding, computational genomics, mass-spectrometry, cryo-electron microscopy, micro-fluidics, etc, are not things the 'typical' person knows exist, and certainly can't relate to.  So, Apple doesn't even try to put advertising material around those use cases.  And that's ok, because if you're in an industry that uses Mac for specialized scientific purposes, you're already watching the advertisements from Apple and know how to convert the technical specs to your use case.  And some of those use cases definitely benefit from, e.g., a rack mount form factor, a terabyte of RAM, etc.

15-20 years ago (I won't go farther back than that, since I wasn't there) Macs had gained traction in a variety of research communities because the PPC's native 64-bit chipset allowed 

for more memory to be addressed, as well as more precise calculations on very large & very small numbers than a 32bit processor, etc.  Even once the AMD64 processors were released it was 

years before they were well adopted in the computer industry and had feature parity with the 64-bit chipsets.  The value ranged from esoteric, to the "dumb":  I've seen

business cases submitted for Mac hardware that were approved because a 32 bit version of excel couldn't support more than 65,535 rows/columns, but Sheets / Excel for Mac could, and our scientists

needed more than that.  From that point, even once the AMD64 chipsets on the PC side became ubiquitous and the 64-bit software was ready for prime time, the work was already being performed on Macs and the effort to migrate the tools and workloads would have been enormous.

Back to the present day:  I'm a member of an industry group with about 100 member organizations, and the adoption numbers I see at my dayjob seem to generally hold across those members that are part of the medical research industry..  Bioinformaticians will use the systems for development and testing prior to migrating workloads onto HPC/Super Computing environments.  Based on second hand accounts from colleagues in other research areas, it seems like they see similar adoption rates in other areas of scientific specialty, like fluidics, aerodynamics, astrodynamics, and others.

One of the big use cases I personally see day to day is that a bioinformation will try a process/model at small scale, check it for correctness, and then migrate it onto a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment (aka a super computer) for large scale computational work.

Bioinformatics is heavy on memory usage.  It's also adopting GPU capabilities.  My group is in the process of installing a set of HPC nodes (Rocky Linux for those that are curious) that each have multiple GPUs installed.  These will never have a monitor attached to them, except for the first time the computer is turned on to ensure it properly adds itself to the HPC cluster, and in the event of a hardware failure that requires a component replacement.

And, for the record, I also consider Bioinformatics and the work my employer performs to be a niche industry, relative to Apple's total sales.

Presumably this even affects Keynote…?  Apple have always pushed themselves as being for creatives, and almost all creative work involves presenting to a client in some form – and a lot of that is going to involve them looking at a monitor.

My quick check just now says yes, Keynote & Powerpoint are both impacted.  

-John

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[Mark Valenzuela]

Apropos to this conversation:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/22/av-artists-frustrated-by-orange-dot-macos/

On Dec 21, 2021, at 3:19 PM, John Forrister <jo...@segfault.com> wrote:



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[Stephen Swift]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 12:42 Chris Ashworth <ch...@figure53.com> wrote:

I have not tried this and I do not endorse it, but this just crossed my radar as well:

https://github.com/s4y/undot 

The real solution will be Apple changing something, though.  

The undot developer also posted an update claiming if the app captures an external display for exclusive use, you won’t get a dot, but I haven’t seen any confirmation. 

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29628338

CGDisplayCapture

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/1456259-cgdisplaycapture

[Andy Dolph]

Isn't QLab already doing that?  (at least from my users perspective once QLab is outputting to a display nothing else can show on it - except the damn orange dot)

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[jimsta...@zoho.com]

The easiest way to see non-exclusive use is to move the mouse onto one of your video displays... Hopefully not during a show.

Jim

[micpool]

Sorry to upset all those people that assumed that this was Apple providing a complex  privacy feature.

It appears that this is just an ill thought out bit of nonsense that can be easily defeated with one line of AppleScript!

tell application "System Events" to tell application process "Control Centre" to tell window 1 to set the position to {0, -20}

Merry Christmas Ho! Ho Ho!

Mic

[Andy Dolph]

That's amazing!  Thank you so much

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[micpool]

For multiple displays (arranged side by side) use this.

tell application "System Events" to tell application process "Control Centre"  --US and International English users should us "Control Center"

repeat with eachwindow in windows

set theCurrentPosition to the position of eachwindow

set the position of eachwindow to {(item 1 of theCurrentPosition), -20} --this sets the dot position  above the bounds of  each display

end repeat

end tell

It's unclear if the fact that position  is a modifiable attribute of windows of "control centre" is by design or just an oversight, most of the other attributes are non modifiable, so it's essential to continue to send bug reports to apple explaining the impact the orange dot on displays that don't show the menu bar  has on the events and  theatre industries, as it's probably very easy  for Apple to make this a non modifiable attribute in future security updates or OS versions, if they didn't intend users to be able to modify those attributes in the first place. (Or if the opinions of  users that have been very vociferous in their approval of the dot being shown on every connected display in other forums, regardless of any impact this may have on the AV industries, as justified by remarks along the line of  as " my privacy trumps your aesthetic sensibilities",  prevail)

It's also worth pointing out this is non persistent i.e if you close QLab workspaces and reopen them you will need to run the script again, easily done as a start up cue in QLab/settings/general. 

Mic

[sstaub]

Found that link on ifun.de YellowDot app https://lowtechguys.com/yellowdot/ 

[Tyshawn Cormier]

In macOS Monterey 12.2, the recording indicator has moved into a lower-level system component called WindowServer, so exiting solutions like undot, YellowDot, and AppleScript can no longer move or hide it. Hiding the microphone recording indicator light requires a new approach.

So I made Recording Indicator Utility which supports macOS 12.2 and lets you turn off the recording indicator light system-wide. You can also hide the recording indicator by choosing a list of apps or automatically hide it in full-screen. Get it here:

https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/RecordingIndicatorUtility

-Tyshawn

[micpool]

Top work Tyshawn.

But it's really troubling that  Apple instead of  responding to all the pleas from the live events and broadcast users that the orange dot not appear on secondary monitors by having the option to remove it,  have chosen to double down and make it even more difficult to deal with. One dreads to think what's next!

Mic

[Graham Coates]

Agreed! Nicely done. Still... I can sort of understand why it’s there.  

Imagine that Josephine Schmoe is sitting at her computer doing a research paper in her dorm room, and suddenly that orange light turns on.

Is she being recorded?  Is someone listening in to what noises are going on in her room?

I agree.  Apple should make it tough to remove that.  But it should be possible.

I work at a school as an IT-Admin.  We have about 160 Mac laptops.

With the advent of Monterey, there is NO WAY to prevent student computer screens from showing that their screen is being monitored without some serious knowledge of command line work. Previous to Monterey you could only see if your screen was being monitored from the Lock Screen.

The orange dot sucks. But I get it.  If anyone’s interested in how to hide the menubar icon for ARD, let me know!  

I thank you too, Tyshawn. Great work!  Hehe 10 bucks says Apple finds a way to break your app!   =)