I think it's unacceptable that a third-party driver is necessary to record system audio on Mac. Both Windows and Linux have been able to natively record system audio for at least 20 years now. I consider it a basic required feature for something like screencasting.
Essential part of my home studio audio stack (Serato / Ableton / OBS / BlackHole / Aggregate/Multi-output devices in Audio MIDI setup).
Agree with others in this post that it's WAY too hard to get a stable stack on OSX and that a tool like BlackHole should be standard in the OS.
WAY too hard to get a stable stack on OSX
compared to what?
for me Windows is the king in backwards compatibility. I get the sense they expend significant resources doing testing in this space and scrutinizing ABIs and APIs and all that. They don't want to disturb the developer ecosystems with bedrock changes.
Not for audio. Do you use DirectSound, ASIO, WASAPI?
On MacOS there is CoreAudio, and it's been there for two decades.
Yeah, but with each MacOS Update your expensive hardware might become as useful as a brick.
I have a audiointerface from 2002 that I can plug into my windows machine and it runs. The same interface worked on Mac, once.
Definitely, MacOS busts kext extensions and other software without mercy leaving the devs to either keep up or to bite the bullet and abandon ship. For projects that are labors of love those often fall to the wayside and you get stuck romanticizing earlier versions of MacOS when you used to be able to do xyz. One I’ve been longing for is a rerelease of https://www.orderedbytes.com/controllermate/
Well, I'm sorry to report we've had the first breach in that policy in ... well forever!
https://www.theverge.com/24148033/satya-nadella-microsoft-se...
ah what a conundrum, pitting legacy over security that's a big tradeoff decision. Those mostly seems like independent topics but I wonder if the deeper you go in maximizing legacy support the more vulnerable you make your systems in falling for security lapses of some kind. I wonder if these two things tangle in unforeseen ways deep beneath the surface.
compared to how easy I think it should be =)
- Seriously though trying to understand audio midi setup from docs was pretty awful. - I've had a bunch of (mostly DJ) equipment refuse to connect with newer macs as they keep changing their security model. - Managing/fighting latency took a lot of experimentation (for me anyway). - The soundflower / blackhole stuff can be a pain until you've stitched everything together once or twice.
Ditch the Aggregate devices for a start ( yes it’s expensive running a lot of inputs or outputs on a proper system, and you don’t take advantage of all the interfaces built into gear). Uninstall Blackhole and spend the money on Rogue Amoeba stuff.
Buy audio interfaces with good drivers (e.g. RME, Lynx, Metric Halo or even MOTU AVB stuff and stay away from Antelope - they have problems), install, plugin and away you go.
Seconded. Rouge Amoeba has great tools
Thanks - will definitely look at upgrading this part of the chain. It's been a headache.
If you think the situation is bad on Mac, you e never had to fight with ASIO on Windows.
On Mac stuff basically just works.
On Windows ASIO works with only ASIO, and doesn’t allow the OS to use the card for “regular” sound unless the device-specific driver allows for it.
Edit: Or in most cases for two ASIO applications to use the same soundcard at the same time. So you end up needing to install a virtual loopback anyway, losing out on the (theoretical) latency benefits of ASIO.
It is unfortunate, the old windows media stack had a nice drag and drop UI that let you connect different inputs and sinks together in all sorts of weird and cool ways. Back when I used Windows 2000 I was able plug a game console into a capture card and split the audio and video inputs so they both went out over streaming video and were visible/audible on my local machine.
Not that anyone cared about watching live streamed video game footage back in 2001 or so.
The problem with the old apis (and this includes directsound) is that they are incapable of stabling running at low latency, which is crucial for recording.
Nitpick: it’s macOS since 2016 :)
That is very nice. I've been looking for something like this. It's useful in the case where you want to do a tutorial with an application that produces sound, but you want to talk at the same time. The best solution before would be to plug a 3.5mm cable into an audio interface that accepts this sort of input, and then record at the same time. The problem is that then you cannot do small cuts in real-time as easily as if you are recording directly into a DAW with audacity, and plus it gives you the possibility of using real-time effects with your DAW.
Good for streaming also, without needing to use OBS, which is hit and miss when it comes to some things.
Rogue Amoeba provides some really great software if BlackHole isn't enough for you. Loopback and Audio Hijack in particular.
I feel like Loopback would be enough for anyone. You can do everything I’ve ever needed to do, and I had some hare-brained ideas during the pandemic.
Audio Hijack is good if you want to add some VST plugin processing.
A good usecase is having a nice mic for your Zoom calls or Youtube videos and doing basic noise filtering, compression and limiting on it w/o having to run a full DAW in the background.
Otherwise Loopback does everything else like piping specific sound sources from one app to another, without the rest of system audio.
Some Audio Hijack features seem unusually well suited to stealing music from Spotify.
For example one can have a free spotify account, then Audio Hijack is a few clicks from saving the music with automatic file splitting between tracks.
There's nothing specific to Spotify. Audio is audio, there will always be the analog dub route, same as recording from radio to cassette in the 80s
There's nothing specific to Spotify.
Well suited doesn't meant designed for, and that's not the implication.
The thread of this conversation is why someone might use Audio Hijack instead of a no-cost alternative (of which there are many.)
I'm suggesting that Audio Hijack makes it very easy to rip music from free music services such as Spotify. Thus providing a reason why someone might choose to pay for Audio Hijack rather than the no-cost option.
It's much tidier to have a set of pre-sorted (and if one is clever, pre-named and tagged) output files rather than having one long audio output that would require time to sit and divide up manually.
In my experience if the silence gap is set too low, any pause or silence in the song will trigger a new file for the same song, and if too big, it will sometimes lump two songs together.
It takes extra time verifying that each file is only one track and the full track.
I have opted to turn off the silence detection, record one big file of my playlist, and then use Fission to split up the file while referencing the length of each track. Audacity is a free wav editor that would work for this, but I do love Rogue Amoeba software and Fission is probably a bit quicker.
It still takes a little time but Fission does make it fairly quick and easy, and I prefer this consistent process.
So in my opinion, the auto silence separation is not a killer feature that makes ripping audio significantly easier.
Also I don't think it has the ability to automatically name files appropriately, so you still have to go back and name each individual file, which I handle as I'm splitting them.
The use case you mentioned is pretty much exactly what I've been wanting to do: run some EQ / filtering / compression on my decent mic so I sound great in Zoom and Google Meet video calls.
I tried using OBS' audio filters and routing through VB-Cable for that, but people in the call complained that my audio was lagging behind the video. If Audio Hijack would address that issue, or if anyone has other suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. So far it feels like "close, but no cigar".
It's worth noting you do have to downgrade security permissions for Loopback, but not for BlackHole: https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=A...
I use Loopback and BlackHole both, although for different reasons/setups. I guess it's more an artifact of the surrounding macOS environment at the conception of each project. BlackHole's first commit was September 2019, while Loopback was released in 2016 (but also shares its capture engine with Audio Hijack, and its 1.0 release was 2002!)
Replying to myself--it looks like they do have a new capture framework relying on much newer APIs (requires macOS 14.4). It just isn't rolled out to Loopback yet: https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2024/04/05/our-new-installer-...
I'm pretty sure Rogue Amoeba are the reason why Apple doesn't ship with one by default.
I use Amoeba too, really nice piece of software:)
Audio Hijack has a block for whisper in the newer version.
The animations in the tool are quite good. Very polished.
Do you look at the code / line count when you open a project like this?
I have this "hard time" imagining what the X thousands lines of code do. Even more when the piece of software claims to be simple. I would have to devote months to really understand it, I guess, and "cure" this "superficialitis" (tendency to think everything is 50 lines of code)
I guess compilers are the only "kind" of project I can imagine a few complex parts.
This has “I could build Slack in a weekend” energy.
Yes, this is what I mean, how to get better at this etc.
The best way to cure this is to write something in 50 lines to show the world how it's done, and wager a large donation to e.g. the trump election campaign if you leave a public ticket unfixed for more than a week. As soon as you try to interface with other people's workflows and needs, the 50 lines turn into thousands very quickly.
“The devil is in the details”, as they say.
A large amount of the code is the C boilerplate for implementing the object graph needed by audio system. You'll see that basically every function is a huge switch-case.
I just looked at the code. It's mostly just handling events and conditions a driver would need to handle just to be a functional driver.
I don't think you could write any driver in 50 lines of code?
I guess compilers are the only "kind" of project I can imagine a few complex parts.
What's so hard about a compiler? You read some files, split into tokens, sort into a tree, and then walk the tree and write some instructions to disk at each node. Can be done in a couple hundred lines of code. (\s: the point is that all software gets complicated, and a few thousand lines is not a lot of code)
I would have to devote months to really understand it, I guess, and "cure" this "superficialitis" (tendency to think everything is 50 lines of code)
You wouldn’t have to spend months understanding it, but you also wouldn’t be able to glance at the code for 5 minutes and understand everything that needs to happen.
Anything that handles driver or system level operations and deals with audio will get complex quickly. What happens when the input device gets unplugged? The output device disconnects? User changes from speakers to AirPods?
How do you handle situations where the input and output sample rate are different? What about when something backs up and a buffer overflows? Or underflows? What mechanism do you use for handling user setting changes?
The list of situations you have to handle goes on and on. The core concept is simple, but there are so many things to do that the code base will naturally become bigger than the 50 lines of code you’re imagining.
Skimming or folding to only show the names of the functions might make it easier to grok. For example, there are about 75 OSStatus messages this driver supports.
There are a ton of case statements; each one represents a situation that must be supported.
3500 lines goes quickly when you divide it by a few hundred situations/statuses.
As comments in another discussion tree have said, it's a shame that macOS doesn't provide some of this natively. If it did then this would probably be higher level code and shorter. Knowing where the boundary lies between the system and the application is part of having an understanding of why all this was written.
I wouldn't feel bad about this; it's just a domain knowledge thing. Be excited by the opportunity to learn with a toy project or a deep code review!
you’re awesome!! I’ll test if i can ditch loopback by rogue amoeba for your piece of software :)
Why would you want to ditch Loopback?
Because of price gouging. $100 for basic audio routing is absurd, and they'll hit you up again eventually for upgrades.
That’s fair. It isn’t cheap, but they’re the only ones I know of who can route things around and mix them together without a DAW or some other utility running.
MacOS doesn’t even have per application volume control, which is a crazy thing to say for the OS aimed at audio professionals (at least as far as I know.)
The lack of per-application volume is annoying I agree, as a consumer.
But I don't think that's a feature requested by audio professionals. They're working within applications, not playing audio from multiple apps at the same time. And it would be extremely annoying to discover that your DAW output volume had accidentally somehow been set to 90% and you hadn't realized it. I mean, mixing is done with visual decibel meters, but a lot still depends on little details that are above or below the threshold of hearing, which an application-level volume control would mess with.
I’m pretty sure MacOS could easily have a built-in master audio mixer and a setting on that mixer labeled “bypass”, which gives the current MacOS behavior of “no master audio mixer.”
I can’t believe that only a few people have ever asked for a way to mute an app entirely.
I grow weary of excuses around the lack of a built-in feature for this. “Apple doesn’t want to do it” is the only reason.
The whole thing is, it's not basic. Loopback does things that Blackhole cannot, granted it requires a kernel extension.
But if Blackhole does what you need, that's awesome!
If you use it and need it, you’ll get a lot more than $100 worth of value from it. It’s not price gouging, it’s just a small company making enough money to stay in business. They arent sustaining themselves off advertising and your data like big tech
Not mine! Just sharing what I found. I was looking for an alternative to rogue amoeba’s loopback too
Does anything similar exist for video? There have been meetings I've wished I could route a loop of my face looking alert and interested to Zoom instead of a live camera feed Mission-Impossible-style.
What's your plan for getting called on by others to speak?
It's probably just me, but the video in these video calls is mostly a waste of bandwidth, I am never paying attention to the bobbing heads in the screen. My point being, I, for one, would not notice very quickly if the person speaking was just a loop of someone looking interested, I sort of want to do this myself, OBS is probably the key, when called to speak you could switch scenes to the live feed.
I did some research into using ffmpeg as a sort of live network based video router and compositor, My conclusion was that it would work. however my heart was set on actual transparent rgba video and support for that was finicky.
It's probably just me, but the video in these video calls is mostly a waste of bandwidth, I am never paying attention to the bobbing heads in the screen
"People and culture" departments would argue that it creates a sense of belonging and cohesion to the team.
Haha I'd this feeling and add another people which doesn't fully adapt to remote, screaming and justifying that the CEO or someone required the open cam!
Just start speaking. The surrealism would be amazing. Just tell them there's clearly something wrong with Zoom. Everyone will buy it.
Also, it's just yet another reason that I'm so happy my Zoom meetings do not require a camera feed. There's just something Orwellian to me about having to have a camera on me. Having a camera on me is my absolute nightmare regardless of the purpose of the camera.
You make sure you are wearing the same clothing as the recorded video loop. Use something like a stReamdeck to have hardware buttons that let you toggle to a live webcam. Elgato even has a foot pedal version that works great.
The issue is there is no standard for video out from a single application (except that apps window buffer).
That said, OBS has a “camera” mode where it will present itself as a camera. Anything you can do in OBS (including playing a video) can be sent to anything that takes camera input.
+1 for OBS virtual camera, works like a charm. Haven’t tried the fake meeting presence idea yet though :p
Is this a free alternative for Audio Hijack / Loopback?
For Loopback, partially. Not so much for Audio Hijack.
I still use Loopback because I like the interface it gives you. If I remember correctly, BlackHole doesn't provide a GUI.
Why not? You can create multi-output audio devices in macos, say blackhole and your speakers and use that multi-output device as the input in the recorder.
Not throwing shade on Blackhole. You can accomplish a lot with it. And yes, technically, it can do most if not all of what Loopback does. I just like the experience of using Loopback more than having to use the built-in MIDI setup in macOS, which I always find a bit confusing.
Oh, actually, now I remember why I bought Loopback in the first place. I couldn't figure out how to map a single stereo input channel to both left and right channels with Blackhole, but Loopback makes that very easy. Maybe it's possible to do with Blackhole, but I'll happily pay to not feel like a confused old man when all I want to do is record audio the way I expect.
In the case of Audio Hijack, one might as well save the money and go with Blackhole instead of Loopback.
And in any case, as much as I normally embrace FOSS, Rogue Amoeba makes high quality software that's worth paying for, so I'm not champing at the bit to replace them.
And in any case, as much as I normally embrace FOSS, Rogue Amoeba makes high quality software that's worth paying for, so I'm not champing at the bit to replace them.
I tried really hard to get my desired audio setup to work with stock Mac OS features, but it was just... not good.
I have two Apple Monitors flanking both sides of a larger display with terrible speakers. I wanted to split left/right between the two Apple monitors. With Audio Midi Setup, I got it to work, but then I couldn't adjust the volume with the soft keys.
I installed Loopback and Soundsource. Everything just worked, and it was very easy to configure. The price was a little high, but I'm not really the target customer. Was worth it to not have to put bulky speakers on my desk.
I don't recall exactly my issues, but definitely found some things that didn't work this way.
It's also a pain to set things up this way (compared to loopback or hijack).
Yes, depending on what you need it for. It does require a bit more setup though.
I've been using this for years to route audio between DAW's. Once it's set up, it runs flawlessly.
How is the latency for you? I know blackhole is advertised as 0ms itself, but I always found that crossing virtual devices incurred the input/output latency of the daw itself.
I haven't experimented with lowering these numbers in maybe two years, but I use BlackHole to route 8 channels from Traktor to Ableton Live (all four decks in stereo as external outputs). I have one big aggregate device with my internal speakers for clock, the BlackHole bridge, and an original RME Babyface for the physical output.
Looks like I have Traktor set to 192 samples @ 44khz. It's showing "4.4 ms processing + 17.6ms output = 22.0 ms" in its UI.
Ableton is set to 128 samples, and showing "Input Latency 4.72 ms, Output Latency 6.05 ms, Overall Latency 10.8 ms".
So maybe 33.8 ms in the whole pipeline? Although I throw audio signal across the room via the Babyface's optical out to a cheap optical -> RCA box, so that's probably adding a little more to my physical environment.
I've had this same Traktor/Live setup going for a long, long time. At one point I even used a physical loopback with the Babyface's optical out/in carrying 8 channels between Traktor and Ableton. That was sadly better than any software available before BlackHole. It was solid, although a bit higher latency, and it's nice to be able to use the optical out for its intended purpose!
I used to get very occasional crackle this BlackHole setup, until I tried a random tip of using the built-in speakers as the clock source on an aggregate device. It's been rock solid since. I could probably lower sample buffers even further these days (M3 Max)...
Yeah, I always adjust for that. I don't remember how much exactly but definitely noticeable.
not if you use JACK (available on macOS) or PipeWire (not)
Something like this should be default in MacOS. I use blackhole daily in my audio production and sound design practices. If you use a modern audio interface you might have a loopback available there.
macOS 14.2 implemented something like this in Core Audio, but it is not user facing (and also documented extremely poorly). You can create a "Tap" that can capture audio from a particular application, or subset of applications, or an output device. This can then be added to a private or public Aggregate Device (depending on the Tap being private or public).
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreaudio/4160724-...
Sweet! Thanks for sharing, I will keep my eyes on this.
As a Linux user I'm lacking some context here. Does the default in macOS have too high latency? Or how is BlackHole different from it?
macOS doesn’t have a loopback device by default
I've personally been using a nifty piece of software called VB-Cable, which basically does the same thing. Creates a software audio output as well as an audio input, which you can then use across different applications.
I personally use it to route my studio mic input through OBS, where I apply some filtering, to then be able to use it with different VoIP software.
Do you need additional software for this? Can’t you use OBS as a webcam[0] and take its audio source? (I haven’t tried, but that’s how I’d approach it if I was going to).
Unfortunately, no, OBS handles video only, no audio comes through the camera. It's really frustrating, I have wanted to do some more complicated audio setups on a Windows PC (specifically bridging two calls on different platforms together, I know the latency would be bad), but you have to use the VB CABLE proprietary driver, of which you can only have one for free, or try playing with Voicemeeter (same company with old, proprietary software). I have tried Synchronous Audio Router, but I couldn't get it to work after hours of pressing buttons.
On Mac, I can just buy Rogue Amoeba software, and on Linux, I can just run some commands or download a GUI to route audio around however I want.
I always want this but for Midi, and cross platform. Working on multiple platforms with audio equipment is so annoying to a casual user hah.
This is what I've been using since upgrading to M1 because SoundFlower I used on my previous Mac is a kernel extension and installing those on Apple Silicon is a mess.
SoundFlower is a total nightmare to install and remove, causes huge problems and then requires hours of work to remove completely.
As is pretty much anything that comes in a .pkg, to be honest. It's kinda bonkers that you need third-party apps to (attempt to) cleanly uninstall things.
How so? Isn't it just a kext? What prevents you from just deleting the kext and launcher?
Hmm on first look, it looks like Audio MIDI Setup App [1].
Then again it looks like patch bay. Then isn't there already: QjackCtl, and that works with mac/win/linux?
links:
1: https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/audio-midi-setup-you...
Technically JACK runs on macOS but last time I checked (a year ago) it doesn't really work and other software doesn't support it anyway.
The screenshot you've looked at is the Audio MIDI Setup App... It just shows that there's Blackhole as an output ;)
Offtopic: I love Audio MIDI Setup for the Multi-Output Device and the possibility of connecting two Bluetooth headphones to one laptop. Is there a similar thing for Windows or Linux?
Many Linux distributions have moved to Pipewire as the default audio daemon in recent years. With Pipewire, you can use Qjackctl or Qpwgraph to edit how devices route to eachother using a visual graph. Pipewire has the distinct advantage that it works with tools for both the PulseAudio daemon and the JACK daemon simultaneously, so you can typically combine things you might do with either.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a good UI that exposes both a graph view and a way to create virtual devices for more advanced routing, however there is very rich support for advanced routing:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/Vir...
So there's probably no direct analogue, as at best you'll probably need to run some commands to get a device to combine streams for you, and then you can hook it in using Qpwgraph.
Pipewire also handles video devices and graphs too.
If you ever want to try this with a proper audio interface, you'll also want to switch the audio interface into Pro Audio mode most likely. It's a profile that can be selected (typically in whatever handles your volume settings, e.g. pavucontrol)
Yeah, in Linux with Pulse https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/443064
There might be other ways to do it depending on your distribution, for example https://askubuntu.com/q/78174
What is an Audio Loopback Driver? What does it do? What is it used for?
It lets you use the audio output of one program as the audio input of another program in arbitrary ways. A handy tool for live media like streaming- maybe I want my game and music to be streamed, but not my notifications or my A/V tech's voice in my ear. For audio production you can also wire the output of one music creation tool into the input of another.
I think the Windows equivalent of this software is Synchronous Audio Router: https://github.com/eiz/SynchronousAudioRouter
I also find it interesting that all of the examples are for routing DAWs to video call apps. Don’t these apps have screen sharing and wouldn’t that be higher quality than using the microphone input?
Usually the idea is to record DAW audio seperately, so when you go back and actually edit the video you're not limited to whatever horrible 64Kbps compression algo the video call uses.
Plus you'll often want to be using some sort of mixer to mix in a vocal/talk mic also.
And you can pair this with Element [1] to do nice routings.
For example, in my live sets I send 8 separate audio channels from Ableton Live via a miniDSP optical interface [2] to my music partner's audio interface who does fx and live mixing.
When I'm working on the sets without him I don't have the midiDSP audio device plugged in and Ableton get's annoying. So I set up a routing in Element from BlackHole 8 track to mix down to stereo and my usual stereo output without having to remap my channels in Ableton. Just switch output devices.
is Element like Apples MainStage? https://www.apple.com/mainstage/
This is how I record all of my work meetings, especially when I need to CYA
Using BlackHole also fixes any awful audio popping in Rosetta/legacy apps, since Apple can't seem to figure that out.
This is an awesome program highly recommend. Used to be called Soundflower back in the day but BlackHole works better and works with new M series Mac’s. Awesome!
Over the pandemic, I used this and OBS with a USB HDMI capture dongle attached to my Nintendo Switch to host Jackbox Party Pack nights with friends over Zoom. Such a great tool!
Recently, I had to record a video call (both audio and my screen) while wearing headphones. Using OBS and BlackHole together was the only option I could find at the time.
I'm glad to see this! So many posts online still cheerfully suggest using SoundFlower for this purpose, which doesn't work with M1 Macs.
Idea: feed this to a recurrent neural network
Idea: feed the meeting audio using this to a black mass. A singularity program that converts words into action.
On Linux it's
pacmd load-module module-loopback
It was vastly overdue, but macOS shipped a native solution for screen recording with audio in macOS 12 and you no longer need BlackHole for that. BH is still useful for more advanced uses, but they're mostly the sort of thing where it's not jarringly weird that they require some third-party software.
Last time I checked QuickTime was still not able to. Did I miss something?
I checked and seems to be just Microphone (or other audio) input w/ QuickTime when recording sceengrab videos or recording just audio.
This is correct. And if you use a headset it won't pick up the general system sounds. Used it for an IEP call last week and found out afterwards the only audio it picked up was my own. Pretty frustrating.
yah, I just recently made the purchase for BlackHole because I couldn't get the system sounds otherwise. Great little project!
I really could have sworn that around 2017 there was a way to do this built in, but it went away pretty quickly. Or I just imagined that
But then again Windows has no native web cam multiplexing. One app has the camera, and no one else can use it. That app crashes and you need to reboot Windows.
One would think in the edge of remote work, an operating system would bring a virtual web cam driver.
I used ManyCam but they cheated me out of a lifetime license.
Is there any major company that's respected a "lifetime license" for more than five or ten years? Every one I've bought was eventually reneged on.
WinRAR!
Does a single-computer license count as "lifetime" though?
Wonder if it's like taking a screenshot of video on mac.
They don't want you to be able to do that.
(you get a blank area where the video is)
You sure it isn’t DRMed video? It’s the same on all platforms
I’m not at my computer to check, but if this really is true, use VLC to get screen grabs from videos
yes, but fair use should let you do it.
maybe the same thing happens with audio, but there's no drm knowledge/support so they didn't implement any of it.
That's why MacOS provides this in ScreenCaptureKit
Can that record the system audio too? I mean not just the microphone like in Quicktime.
Yes, microphone access is through CoreAudio. ScreenCaptureKit is for capturing system video and audio.
I haven't used it personally but that's my understanding of why it exists. Otherwise there's no point to sending audio through it.
Good news: it's not. At least not from macOS Ventura onwards.