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BlackHole Audio Driver

github.com

41–50 of 68 posts

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#41
post #3

Description to save a click: BlackHole is a modern macOS virtual audio driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency.

For people who worked with Networing before: this is not the same as a blackhole router ;-)

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#42
Super useful utility for those odd times you need to record the system audio. Seems more stable than Soundflower, and I don’t need to do this often enough that I’d invest in Audio Hijack!

Has anyone found an easy way to route the audio to the speakers as well as through Blackhole? I use Ableton to do this, which works but feels like overkill and isn’t much good if I’m trying to tell someone else how to use it who doesn’t have Ableton. There used to be a little Apple app in some kind of extra tools zip which would route any input to any any output but it doesn’t work on newer macOS.

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#43

Super useful utility for those odd times you need to record the system audio. Seems more stable than Soundflower, and I don’t need to do this often enough that I’d invest in Audio Hijack! Has anyone found an easy way to route the audio to the speakers as well as through Blackhole? I use Ableton to do this, which works but feels like overkill and isn’t much good if I’m trying to tell someone else how to use it who doe…

Your question seems to be covered here with some limitations. https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole/wiki/Multi-Out...

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#44
post #40

Fun fact: Apples tries to prevent you from using virtual audio devices like BlackHole with macOS's dictation and speech to text features. I've been unable to get macOS to output the high quality Siri voice to a virtual audio device for recording. It forces a lower quality voice. Sadly this derailed my plans to use it as a free audio transcripter... (but there's better alternatives and a workarounds)

Does this use lower quality voice?

  $ say -v Samantha -o out.aiff "Hello World"
  $ open out.aiff

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#45
Last year I tried this driver (and Soundflower, and a bunch of other similar stuff) because I needed to transmit my system audio + microphone via Skype (online music classes thanks to COVID). I couldn't get it to work properly for my setup, where I wanted to listen just the system audio through my headphones but route system + microphone to Skype. I ended up buying Loopback [1], it's not cheap but it worked pretty well, it's pretty easy to use and enabled basically any kind of connection I wanted. I leave it here because it took me quite some time to find alternatives, so if anyone finds this driver doesn't cover their use cases maybe this other is helpful.

https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#46
post #44
post #40

Fun fact: Apples tries to prevent you from using virtual audio devices like BlackHole with macOS's dictation and speech to text features. I've been unable to get macOS to output the high quality Siri voice to a virtual audio device for recording. It forces a lower quality voice. Sadly this derailed my plans to use it as a free audio transcripter... (but there's better alternatives and a workarounds)

Does this use lower quality voice? $ say -v Samantha -o out.aiff "Hello World" $ open out.aiff

Yea "Samantha" isn't a Siri voice. They aren't listed in `say -v '?'`, but you can address a Siri voice directly like this (if it's installed):

  say -v "com.apple.speech.synthesis.voice.custom.siri.helena" hi
It'll error out mysteriously with the message `Open speech channel failed: -86`

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#47
post #40

Fun fact: Apples tries to prevent you from using virtual audio devices like BlackHole with macOS's dictation and speech to text features. I've been unable to get macOS to output the high quality Siri voice to a virtual audio device for recording. It forces a lower quality voice. Sadly this derailed my plans to use it as a free audio transcripter... (but there's better alternatives and a workarounds)

How do trigger the dictation/TTS with Siri? I wonder if a hardware audio interface with loopback can do it - I will give it a go if you give me some steps :)

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#48

Super useful utility for those odd times you need to record the system audio. Seems more stable than Soundflower, and I don’t need to do this often enough that I’d invest in Audio Hijack! Has anyone found an easy way to route the audio to the speakers as well as through Blackhole? I use Ableton to do this, which works but feels like overkill and isn’t much good if I’m trying to tell someone else how to use it who doe…

A MacOS aggregate audio device might help? https://support.apple.com/en-ie/HT202000

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#49

Super useful utility for those odd times you need to record the system audio. Seems more stable than Soundflower, and I don’t need to do this often enough that I’d invest in Audio Hijack! Has anyone found an easy way to route the audio to the speakers as well as through Blackhole? I use Ableton to do this, which works but feels like overkill and isn’t much good if I’m trying to tell someone else how to use it who doe…

Your question seems to be covered here with some limitations. https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole/wiki/Multi-Out...

Ah ha thanks!

Re: BlackHole Audio Driver

#50

Super useful utility for those odd times you need to record the system audio. Seems more stable than Soundflower, and I don’t need to do this often enough that I’d invest in Audio Hijack! Has anyone found an easy way to route the audio to the speakers as well as through Blackhole? I use Ableton to do this, which works but feels like overkill and isn’t much good if I’m trying to tell someone else how to use it who doe…

A MacOS aggregate audio device might help? https://support.apple.com/en-ie/HT202000

Didn’t think of this, I use them all the time for other stuff too! Thanks
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