Soundflower, the excellent free utility from Cycling ’74 for routing inter-application audio on Mac OS X, is now Universal for Intel Macs. Cycling has also put up new suggestions for how to make it useful:
- Access your iTunes library via your cell phone, thanks to DittyBot. (Since this is Create Digital Music, just load up your set on iTunes, hit your gig, head for the bar, and bring new meaning to “phoning it in.”)
- Record Skype: Yep, this is the fastest way to record a Skype call on Mac.
- Inter-application audio: Aside from hooking up your favorite audio recorder to TextEdit’s voice-to-speech so you can pull off the now-cliched “robotic Mac voice”, a la Radiohead, you could actually use this for useful stuff, like routing sound between apps that don’t support ReWire.
Of course, this should sound familiar to anyone who knows the superb Linux-bred utility JACK, which offers this and much more. It’s worth checking out both; JACK has by far the deeper feature set, but if you need only quick-and-dirty routing, Soundflower could be the way to go. Truly die-hard Mac inter-app audio lovers might even use both, especially since they’re both free and now both run on Intel Macs.
Thanks to Nick Inhofe for this, a guy who’s cool enough to have interned at Skywalker and earned an IMDB page!
Previously: Mactel Watch: JACK for OS X now Universal; Free Inter-App Audio on Intel (and other) Macs