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.

Just last week I wanted to add some VST Effects to my microphone input on Windows like I do on my Mac. Basically just an EQ and Compressor. With SoundSource this is - as you said - pretty easy. On Windows I've tried Virtual Audio Cable and was initially confused by the Banana and Potato version. Also it required a separate VST Host, something that SoundSource has implemented. In the end my setup worked by using Virtual Audio Cable, routed my microphone into FL Studio into my effect chain and then from FL Studio back into the system so each application gets the microphone with effects. I also tried Minihost Modular as a VST Host but that does not support VST3 and in the end I just gave up because sometimes it was far too complicated