I’m happy to say we’ve made this feature available for testing in our public beta builds which are rolling out to every Creative Cloud member right now. Public Betas are an opportunity to share features and fixes as early as possible to gather feedback. For more details about the Public Beta and how to install these tools, please visit https://theblog.adobe.com/introducing-public-beta/

You’ll now see a new audio device option on MacOS: System Default. When selected for input, output, or both, Premiere Pro, Audition, After Effects, AME, Character Animator, and Rush will use whichever audio device is set as the OS option, and will switch automatically when that changes.

For instance, if you plug in a USB microphone while Premiere is open, and System Default is selected as your default input device, Premiere will automatically switch over to use the new microphone for recording voiceovers if MacOS recognizes this device as its own default input source. If you were using the built-in Macbook speakers but then plug in headphones, the applications will automatically switch output to the headphone jack.

There are some caveats with certain devices, such as Apple Airpods or other bluetooth devices which have limited sample rates for their microphones. For example, Airpods will play audio at 48kHz, but have a limit of 16kHz for the microphone. Due to the nature of our symmetrical audio requirements, this may adjust the shared sample rate to the highest common denominator – in this case, 16kHz which won’t sound very good. Soon, we’ll introduce new functionality to catch this case and disable the input if it would cause degradation. You’ll be able to override it if you like, but we’ll err on the side of data integrity.

Please give it a try and share feedback through the new Beta Community buttons in the beta applications.

We anticipate resolving this problem in an upcoming release, and I will update this UserVoice item to “Completed” when the new functionality is fully tested and available.

With newer Apple systems, especially those based on the T2 chipset, many previously singular states of the Built-in audio interface are now exposed as completely different virtual devices by MacOS. One used to be able to plug in a pair of headphones and let the OS re-route the output automatically. Now, this either requires a manual change, or utilizing new frameworks for the same functionality.

Thanks for your feedback, and please stay tuned.