Software audio routers
danmackinlay.name
danmackinlay.name
The NSM (Non/New Season Manager) system is best for saving and recalling the state of the graph. RaySession is a modern NSM front-end+backend.
There's also LV2; it uses RDF to define both the audio unit properties and the relations between them. If only Ingen and mod-host and Carla, with their LV2 plugin graphs, went the full hog and could be used in their (Ingen and Carla anyway) LV2 plugin forms to work as easy-to-make semi-modular software synths, that would be cool. (Part of the thought behind LV2 was to provide a session/graph saving format)
It seems like no one who designs this stuff ever says "this is too complicated, it doesn't have to be this way, we need to work on simplifying it".
I think when clever people get together and there is no adult in the room to represent people who actually have to use this stuff, no one wants to admit that it's over complicated, because that becomes an admission of not being as clever as everyone else in the room.
I think they do, but it's yet another XKCD 927 case.
Another one for Windows is ASIO Link Pro, which is quite old but still works well under Windows 10.
Switching between cameras is a godsend for calls (one for my face, and another one pointing vertically down at a blank pad of paper) but I guess there’s less demand for switching between audio in a streaming studio setting, and mixing live audio from multiple sources is a music thing, where there are much better solutions?
Hmm it's not that new, I guess maybe the article is old? In any case, BlackHole works very well for me on Mac (I only really use it for real time recording the system audio into Quicktime screen recordings, so have not stress tested it).
An interesting related-ish Mac app is Monkey Audio Rewind[1], which runs in the background and is always recording the last n minutes of audio, then if there's something you want to capture (e.g. you're playing around on a soft synth and some serendipitous brilliance happens), you can just go into Rewind and export that bit of audio from the buffer. It's nicely designed and seems to work well.
I hate how much audio software on windows lacks.
It's always strange to me when people call Loopback expensive, because I will pay for reliability and ease of operation. I have also had very thorough help from Rogue Amoeba for a situation that involves interconnecting Google Voice and Zoom so that I can call out with Google Voice and join the person on the call to an ongoing Zoom session and it is invisible and seemless for all.
There is value in the porcelain.
I have zero issue paying for RA software. Or any software that works well and doesnt charge me a subscription.
What I expect from a virtual cable is to allow me to connect any source with any sink and that is what solutions provide.
> or applications and drivers with ASIO support
I guess it should be okay to assume all professional apps do support ASIO (and some support JACK natively)?
In many ways it'd been one of the most capable solutions for Windows.
The fine article looks a bit shallow not mentioning it at all.
Some glaring omissions, IMO.
"...BlackHole is new and I have not tried it yet..."
Anyone can type that line and, having tapped the link, I am disappointed to see it (on a hackernews post).
As a reader, I don't need it to be comprehensive either. It's great to find an entry point and I'm happy to do more research as needed.
Nowadays they also have software called "Dante virtual soundcard" (which is just that) and "Dante Via" (which allows you to additionally route individual program's IO — e.g. if you want to put that computers powerpoint and Browser on different faders and send some microphone signal to the Zoom client).
All in all good stuff, but if you "just" want to route things within one machine, probably overkill.
In my experience this works perfectly fine using pipewire on linux, on MacOS Blackhole, on Windows I never needed it because my RME soundcard allows loopback recording and complex routing.