AnkiWeb addon 676963607
Keeps a silent dithered audio stream running during reviews so macOS AirPods stay connected, preventing missing, broken, or dropped audio from short clips.
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| Min Anki | Max Anki | Updated |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1.45 | 26.08+ | 2026-08-06 |
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Keeps Bluetooth headphones awake by playing an inaudible zero-audio stream via SoundKeeper, preventing cut-off card audio on Windows, running only while Anki is active.
Loops silent audio while Anki runs to keep Bluetooth headsets connected and eliminate playback lag at the start of card audio.
Gathers due review cards from chosen decks into one daily-rebuilt filtered deck with configurable order and card limit, preserving normal scheduling.
Sets separate mobile and desktop TTS speeds on AnKing cards while keeping one synced template, fixes macOS and Bluetooth audio delay, and includes a test bench.
Generates free text-to-speech audio with EdgeTTS and offline engines, saving files to cards or streaming during review, with batch generation, voice mapping rules and resumable checkpoints.
Runs a local API server that fetches and streams Danish word pronunciations from Den Danske Ordbog on demand, using a custom URL for Yomitan.
Anki plays short audio clips, and on macOS that does not sit well with AirPods. The opening of a clip goes missing, playback breaks up partway through, and on a long session the connection can drop entirely. Short clips make it worse, and so does having something else playing at the same time.
The add-on holds a silent stream open so the connection never goes idle. I wrote it because nothing in Anki or in macOS fixed the problem.
While you review, an inaudible stream plays through your headphones, so the audio connection is never asked to start from cold. Bluetooth appears to suspend the stream between clips, and waking it repeatedly seems to be what unsettles the connection, though that part is inference rather than something I have confirmed.
The stream is not true silence. It carries dither, meaning random noise at roughly a millionth of full volume, because some Bluetooth stacks treat an all-zero stream as no stream at all and go idle regardless.
macOS and Anki 2.1.45 or newer. On Windows and Linux the add-on loads and does nothing.
Install mpv with brew install mpv. Without it the add-on falls back on the system afplay, which cannot loop a file and so restarts it every ten minutes.
Tools → AirPods audio fix → Settings…
You decide whether it runs at all, and whether it runs only around audio or for as long as Anki is open. Running it continuously is more reliable but prevents your headphones from idling, which shortens their battery life noticeably.
Tools → AirPods audio fix → Test it plays a rapid burst of beeps. They should sound even. Choppy or missing beeps mean the connection is still dropping.
A connection dropping for some other reason, such as a congested 2.4 GHz band or headphones low on charge.
It also runs a small background process, either mpv or afplay, for as long as Anki is open. That process stops when Anki quits and is cleaned up on the next launch if Anki crashes.
Ratings on AnkiWeb are close to the only way anyone discovers an add-on, so leaving one is the most useful thing you can do.
Two Anki add-ons I wrote for problems that were bothering me. Neither has any third-party dependency, only the Python standard library and Anki's own APIs.
| Add-on | Problem | Platform | Install |
|---|---|---|---|
| AirPods: fix audio dropouts | Audio clipping and dropping out on AirPods during review. | macOS | AnkiWeb, code 676963607 |
| All your due cards in one deck | Reviews scattered across many decks. | All | AnkiWeb, code 1393821859 |
Tools → Add-ons → Get Add-ons in Anki, then paste the code. To run from source,
copy the add-on's folder into your addons21/ directory and restart.
./build.sh # both
./build.sh bt_audio_keepalive # one of them
This checks the manifest, then writes a .ankiaddon with meta.json,
user_files/ and the caches left out.
CONVENTIONS.md covers the code and STYLE.md covers
anything a user reads. python3 check.py enforces what can be enforced.
Buy me a coffee if one of these saved you some trouble. I am also available for commissioned Anki add-on work.
MIT. Use it, change it, redistribute it, and keep the copyright notice.