A bug saved the company

I love Audio Hijack, and I do use Loopback and SoundSource as well. Windows users love to complain about the fact that we have to pay for this stuff, but forget to mention that no amount of money can give you half of the same functionality on their preferred platform.

I guess you can do some of it using a Windows port of JACK Audio or something, but this isn't trivial to get working - and would still pale in comparison. Why it still is so difficult to route audio in Windows is beyond me.

To give a bit of context; I can sit in a Teams meeting using compressors and saturators and whatnot to make the audio better and put any amount of VST plugins in the chain on my own microphone. At the same time I can mix the output from an ambient track from Spotify with audio from liveatc.net and stream the whole thing to an Icecast server while ripping everything to a file.

Trying to do the same thing on Windows will just drive you insane.

Make sure to check for potential problems while using the SoundSource trial if you have any "professional" audio system extensions installed. I have Dante Virtual Soundcard and a few others (I do live keyboard performance with my M1 Pro macbook), and SoundSource yields intermittently glitchy audio for me when using it casually to multiplex a few simple sources/destinations (Music, browser, bluetooth speakers). Core Audio is a very complicated piece of technology, so it's also very possible the issue is on Apple's side, or in the "pro" extensions themselves.

(That's as of now -- August 2025 -- so it's possible in the future this issue will be resolved. Don't take this as necessarily true if you're reading this in 2026 or beyond.)