Blackhole is a free Soundflower replacement for current Mac users
Users maintaining exotic audio routing and recording configurations on a Mac used to be fond of Soundflower, a free and reliable virtual driver for flexible system audio routing. With Soundflower one could daisy-chain DAW outputs, for example, or bring operating system audio (such as web browser and multimedia) wherever they want for recording and processing.
Alas, its development was eventually abandoned and the driver became non-functional after the release of macOS 10.10. Since then, several alternatives emerged, including paid (Loopback and Audio Hijack) and free (JACK). However, a straight drop-in replacement for Soundflower was not in the cards – until now. Developer Existential Audio is building BlackHole, a free alternative which you can grab straight from Existential’s GitHub. It works much in the same way, integrating software I/O audio channels in a virtual device while running in the background, free of distractions.
The driver jacks into macOS’ Core Audio architecture and supports 16 channels (extendable via advanced customization/driver rebuild) and sample rates up to 192kHz, with no additional latency. It also works under macOS 10.15 Catalina, so yeah – what else do you need?
Download
Head to Existential’s GitHub for download, installation and setup instructions. There’s nothing overly complex to BlackHole – after installation, set up BlackHole as an input and output device in Audio MIDI Setup and in your DAW, then configure up to 16 channels of incoming and outgoing audio. Soundflower is dead, long live BlackHole! If you find it a useful problem solver, consider throwing the developer a bone from Existential’s Patreon page.
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One response to “Blackhole is a free Soundflower replacement for current Mac users”
That sound pretty good. I always combined Soundflower with LineIn so I could plug in my microphone for podcasting. LineIn is no langer available either, does anybody have a free alternative?