#1

I’m looking for some sort of driver/audio mixer that would allow me to route/mix DAW’s outputs to my mac’s built-in output.
The scenario is : i use Ableton Live on stage with several external outputs. When i’m on tour, in the bus for instance or in an hotel room, i don’t necessarily have access to my soundcard. So i cannot hear all the DAW’s channels unless i re-route them to output 1/2. And i really don’t want to mess with this.
I just tried a software called “Loopback” but it doesn’t seem to see Live’s channel (except for 1/2).
Any help ?

#2

Ok, Loopback’s technical support is sooooo fast !
You can achieve this by nesting a Loopback device in another. That’s great.

Any free option ? With perhaps a “mixer” view to adjust levels from the sources ?

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#3

I think you should also be able to do this with Jack. I had to test a 10 channel audio project with only headphones, and was able to route the 10 channel audio from custom software into Reaper, and then mixed down to stereo. I would imagine going the other way is also entirely possible

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#4

Thanks ! no idea how to use/install Jack…

#5

I figured it out. Jack is wonderful ! Thanks !

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#6

soundflower is a simple alternative. (project was dead for a wihle but ingalls is back on it and it works good.)

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#7

+1 soundflower. simple and useful

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#8

This is how I usually do this. Just create a returntrack and send all the tracks there. Then route that to you output.
Another suggestion would be to put the external audio effect on your tracks and set the external audio effect to play out of output 1/2. Then you could map a keyboard letter-shortcut to turn all the effects on or off and like that quickly changing the routing.

#9

@KristofferLislegaard hanks, this won’t work in my case, for several reasons.
@zebra and @SYS2064 :
i couldn’t manage to make soundflower work. It was recognized in Live. I selected the 64 channel output “driver” but couldn’t manage how to route the channels to the built-in soundcard. Isn’t it supposed to be some routing application as well ? Plus, it made the Audio Configuration crash every time (also had Loopback installed, maybe it was the cause).

#10

Soundflower is for routing to another application. So if you would open Max or another Daw or something you could pick up the channels there and route them to your headphones.

If you explain why one of my two methonds won’t work I will gladly help out thinking of another way to do it.

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#11

Opening another application would indeed do the trick, thanks !

I won’t use the Sends solution or the External Effect solution, because usually i would work during the day in the tourbus on the livesets i would be playing in the evening. They are fairly complicated sets with lots of tracks and the risk of making a mistake and save the set in a wrong state is too high. I cannot take the risk.

#12

I have used soundflower before and it seriously messed up something on my computer. I can’t exactly say what but for instance I couldn’t get any sound out of Pure Data and couldn’t manage to change any of the audio settings in the program (even when not using soundflower at all). Generally it seemed to make the audio driver on my mac very unstable. It was an absolute pain to uninstall, nearly impossible actually. I wouldn’t recommend trying it at all.

#13

oh, well, sorry. YMMV i guess. again i would only recommend the recent versions from matt ingalls: https://github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower/releases/

to uninstall soundflower it should be sufficient to remove /Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext and reboot.

it is a really simple utility, as you say for routing audio between applications, not nearly as powerful as jack but a lot easier to setup on mac (again just in my experience.)

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#14

Thank you for the help !