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Comment by deeblering4 | Hacker News Reader

Because of price gouging. $100 for basic audio routing is absurd, and they'll hit you up again eventually for upgrades.

If you use it and need it, you’ll get a lot more than $100 worth of value from it. It’s not price gouging, it’s just a small company making enough money to stay in business. They arent sustaining themselves off advertising and your data like big tech

That’s fair. It isn’t cheap, but they’re the only ones I know of who can route things around and mix them together without a DAW or some other utility running.

MacOS doesn’t even have per application volume control, which is a crazy thing to say for the OS aimed at audio professionals (at least as far as I know.)

The lack of per-application volume is annoying I agree, as a consumer.

But I don't think that's a feature requested by audio professionals. They're working within applications, not playing audio from multiple apps at the same time. And it would be extremely annoying to discover that your DAW output volume had accidentally somehow been set to 90% and you hadn't realized it. I mean, mixing is done with visual decibel meters, but a lot still depends on little details that are above or below the threshold of hearing, which an application-level volume control would mess with.

I’m pretty sure MacOS could easily have a built-in master audio mixer and a setting on that mixer labeled “bypass”, which gives the current MacOS behavior of “no master audio mixer.”

I can’t believe that only a few people have ever asked for a way to mute an app entirely.

I grow weary of excuses around the lack of a built-in feature for this. “Apple doesn’t want to do it” is the only reason.

The whole thing is, it's not basic. Loopback does things that Blackhole cannot, granted it requires a kernel extension.

But if Blackhole does what you need, that's awesome!

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