blackhole

By Sarah, 26 June, 2024

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi, does anyone know how to set up blackhole? I tried installing like sound flower and others but they don't work. I want to create so lik my system audio and my microphone audio are recorded but not the voiceover. It won't let me configure anything or like i can't route certain things to bh. I accidentally set bh as my sound out and lost voiceover and couldn't get it back. I called aira and then had to go to work and then later i had to use a braille display to get my audio back. I understand somehow you have to separate the channels and separate voiceover out and create VO as an agregate device and create a multi audio device which i created that multi thing. I don't know if this is even possible but from what i'm understanding it is a thing.
Thank you in advance
Sarah Lynn A.

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Comments

By Jonathan Candler on Tuesday, June 25, 2024 - 19:27

loopback will let you to this plus way more. Never used black whole before.

By Sarah on Tuesday, June 25, 2024 - 19:27

I figured out that BH was a lot harder, but I tried to install soundflower and it didn’t work. I even disabled SIP and tried to install it and we enabled SIP and the only other options seem to be black hole because loopback does the same thing I think you have to turn off the SIP in order to get it to work so I figured that one wouldn’t work either so I just went to Black hole. I am confused because some people said loop back is free and other people say that it cost And I don’t have $100 but I look like you could do basic stuff for free. Maybe I don’t know. I was really confused on that as well. I wanted soundflower because it sounded so simple but it’s just didn’t work out.

By João Santos on Tuesday, June 25, 2024 - 19:27

Blackhole is a virtual audio device that pretends to be both speakers and microphones, and routes any audio sent through its output side back through its input side.

From your post I gather that you have the following requirements:

  1. Route system audio to a recording application as well as to some headphones;
  2. Route VoiceOver to your headphones only;
  3. Route the microphone to the recording application.

To accomplish all of this, in addition to installing Blackhole, you're going to need to use the Audio MIDI Setup utility that comes with MacOS. Unfortunately this utility wasn't designed to be used with VoiceOver, so in order to use it you'll either have to navigate the Audio Device List using just the arrow keys or disable Cursor Tracking by pressing VO+Fn+Shift+3, as VoiceOver doesn't announce your selection properly when you navigate using its cursor with Cursor Tracking enabled.

To accomplish #1 you'll need to create a multi-output device, and then add both your headphones' output channels and the virtual device created by Blackhole to its list. This causes any audio sent through this device to be routed through Blackhole and through your headphones at the same time.

To accomplish #2 you need to open VoiceOver utility, navigate to the Sound tab, and then set your headphones as the output device, so that VoiceOver audio is routed directly to your headphones instead of through Blackhole and thus not recorded.

To accomplish #3 you'll need to create an aggregate device and add your microphone and Blackhole to it. This allows you to record audio from Blackhole and from your microphone at the same time.

Finally adjust the audio volume to whatever level you feel comfortable with since you won't be able to do so once you change the default output device, open Sound from System Preferences, select the Output tab, and set the multi-output device that you created earlier as the default output. This will route your system audio through blackhole as well as your headphones, then either select the Input tab and set the aggregate device that you created earlier as the default input or select it as input in the recording application. You can also do this in Audio MIDI Setup, but I strongly advise against this since Audio MIDI Setup doesn't confirm whether you wish to keep the new settings, which might result in ending up with no audio at all if for some reason your audio setup is incorrect.

Note #1: If you ever wish to also record VoiceOver using this setup, in addition to setting it to output through the default output device, you will also need to disable Audio Ducking since that doesn't work very well with virtual devices.

Note #2: You might need a variant of Blackhole with more than 2 channels, since last time I checked using the 2 channel variant caused system audio to be routed through one side and the microphone to be routed through the other side. I have no theory that could possibly explain why this happens.