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.

You know what I really love about MacOS? Every time I pair my bluetooth headphones it defaults the microphone to that sound input. Can you disable that microphone like in Windows? Nope.

I use SoundSource because without it digital audio has audio levels locked, which is also asinine. We have to admit, audio control on Macs is straight up garbage, and having to buy third party tools to do something the other major OS does out of the box is not a good look.