Re: Question about OSX audio routing

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Sjaak <tcplugin@scarlet.be> wrote:
> But what if you run both Mainstage and Bidule as host? Suppose I sent 
>Mainstage to output 3/4 of the
> Motu and I add a duplex audio device to Bidule. I can now use the 
>Mainstage output in Bidule, add effects etc
> and route it to output 3/4 again. This works, but I'm wondering if 
>Bidule output 3/4 are mixed into and thus
> added to the original output 3/4 of Mainstage yes or no.

If you target the same Motu output from two parallel applications -
like here Mainstage and Bidule - these two streams will of course be
summed at that Motu output. It doesn't matter if you think about your
way as "Bidule being mixed into Mainstage" or the other way around. It
is simply two audio streams getting summed in the Motu device (and
that's OS X code at work, since OS X runs the CoreAudio driver for the
Motu box).

> Or does Bidule operate at a lower level so Mainstage and Bidule work in 
>series?

No. Not unless you set it up like that with some sort of hack.

> Btw: could JackOSX add anything extra for a live looping situation?

Not in my opinion. The reason is that any live looping situation is
highly timing dependent, being a real-time activity, and the latency
of both Jack and SoundFlower (Cycling74) induce a latency that does
vary depending on what else is happening on the computer. There's no
way of compensating for varying latency.

For non timing critical routing Jack and SoundFlower works fine
though. I use SoundFlower to record mp3 files of phone conferences and
any sort of audio streaming like iTunes, Spotify etc.

Per