How to Route Audio on Mac: Your Options Compared

You are playing music on Spotify and want your Zoom call participants to hear it. Or you are recording a podcast and need browser audio in your DAW. Or you are streaming on Twitch and want OBS to capture what your Mac is playing. All of these require the same thing: getting audio from one app into another.

macOS does not do this by default. Each app handles its own audio in an isolated sandbox, and there is no system-level “send this to that” switch built in. The fix is audio routing software, and there are a few different ways to approach it depending on your needs and budget.

What Audio Routing Actually Means on Mac

Audio routing software creates virtual audio devices: fake microphones and speakers that exist only in software. You send audio into a virtual device, and another app picks it up as if it were a real hardware input.

A few concrete examples of when you need this:

• You want to share music playing on your Mac in a Zoom, Google Meet, or Discord call without screen sharing.
• You are recording a tutorial and want your screen recording to capture what your browser is playing, not just your voice.
• You need OBS to capture game audio or browser audio as a separate source.
• You are podcasting remotely and want to play a music bed or sound effect into your Riverside or Zencastr session.

In every case, the underlying problem is the same: macOS audio is isolated by design, and you need a bridge between apps.

Why macOS Doesn’t Have a Built-In Audio Router

Apple built macOS’s audio sandbox for security reasons. An app should not be able to silently listen to audio from another app — that would make it trivial for malicious software to record FaceTime calls, banking notifications, or anything else playing through your system.

The tradeoff is that legitimate use cases like the ones above also get blocked. Apple provides the Core Audio framework that makes virtual audio devices possible, but they have never shipped a user-facing routing tool. That gap is what third-party audio routing software fills.

Your Three Options

Soundshine ($7.99, One-Time)

Soundshine is a macOS menu bar app that handles the most common routing scenario: taking system audio and making it available as a virtual microphone input.

Install it, click the menu bar icon, toggle routing on, and any app that accepts microphone input can now receive your Mac’s system audio. Zoom, Discord, QuickTime, OBS, GarageBand, Audacity — all of them see “Soundshine Microphone” as a standard input option.

The setup takes about 30 seconds through a guided wizard. Your speakers keep working normally through Soundshine’s passthrough — you do not lose audio while routing it. The virtual mic operates at 48 kHz, 32-bit float stereo.

Soundshine covers one direction of routing very well: system audio in, virtual mic out. If your use case is “I want other apps or people on a call to hear what my Mac is playing,” this handles it.

What Soundshine does not do: complex multi-source routing. If you need to combine a hardware mic, Spotify, and a guest’s audio from Skype onto separate tracks in a DAW, that is a more advanced setup than Soundshine is designed for.

Best for: Sharing system audio in video calls, screen recording with audio, recording browser or app audio, OBS capture.

BlackHole (Free)

BlackHole is a free, open-source virtual audio driver. It creates virtual audio devices (available in 2-channel and 16-channel variants) that you can use as pipes between apps.

Unlike Soundshine, BlackHole does not have a GUI or any automated routing. It is just the pipe — you configure what flows through it using macOS’s built-in Audio MIDI Setup. Getting useful routing out of it typically means creating Aggregate Devices and Multi-Output Devices, which requires some familiarity with how macOS audio works.

A typical setup for routing system audio with BlackHole: create a Multi-Output Device combining your real speakers and BlackHole, set it as your system output, then select BlackHole as an input in your recording app or video call. Once it is working, it works reliably. The challenge is getting it configured correctly the first time, and it can break after macOS updates.

Budget 20–40 minutes for initial setup. The BlackHole guide walks through the full configuration if you go this route.

Best for: Technically comfortable users who want free routing and do not mind manual configuration.

Loopback ($99, One-Time)

Loopback, from Rogue Amoeba, is the professional-grade tool on this list. It uses a visual routing interface where you drag connections between sources and outputs, building a routing graph you can see and modify.

You can combine a hardware mic, audio from Spotify, audio from a video conferencing app, and a sound effects app into a single virtual output — or route them onto separate channels for multitrack recording. If your setup involves multiple sources going to multiple destinations, Loopback gives you the control to wire it precisely.

The price reflects the complexity: $99 one-time. That is the right price for a professional studio setup or a podcast production workflow with multiple concurrent audio sources. For most people who just want to share music in a Zoom call or record what their browser is playing, it is more than the situation requires.

Rogue Amoeba offers a free trial with an audio watermark so you can test whether you actually need the complexity before buying.

Best for: Professional podcast setups, multi-source recording, complex routing between several apps.

Which Tool for Which Use Case

Use case	Tool	Cost
Share audio in Zoom, Meet, or Discord	Soundshine	$7.99
Screen record with system audio	Soundshine	$7.99
Record audio from browser or app	Soundshine	$7.99
Route audio into OBS	Soundshine	$7.99
Free setup, okay with manual configuration	BlackHole	Free
Route multiple sources to multiple outputs	Loopback	$99

Quick Setup: Soundshine

If Soundshine fits your use case, here is how to get running:

1. Download Soundshine from soundshine.app/downloads/Soundshine-1.0.dmg and open the installer.
2. Run the setup wizard. It installs the virtual audio driver in about 30 seconds. You will see one admin password prompt.
3. Click the Soundshine icon in your menu bar and toggle routing on.
4. Open whatever app needs the audio — Zoom, QuickTime, OBS, Discord — and select Soundshine Microphone as the input device.
5. Play audio on your Mac. It flows through the virtual mic to wherever you pointed it.

That is the complete setup. The routing stays active as long as the toggle is on, and you can turn it off from the menu bar when you do not need it.

A Note on Audio Quality

For screen recording and call sharing, most virtual audio setups are more than adequate. Soundshine routes at 48 kHz, 32-bit float, which matches professional audio standards. BlackHole can operate at similar quality if configured correctly. For casual use, the difference between these and standard 44.1 kHz / 16-bit audio is not meaningful. For podcast production or video that will be edited and mastered, the higher bit depth gives you more headroom.

Where to Start

If you need to share system audio in a call or recording and you want it working now, try Soundshine free. The trial watermarks audio output so you can test the full flow before buying.

If you want the free path and have time to configure it, BlackHole works — the BlackHole setup guide has the full walkthrough.

If your routing needs genuinely require combining multiple sources, Loopback is worth the $99. But most people asking “how do I route audio on Mac” are looking for the Soundshine use case, not a professional mixing console.

For more context on what these tools are doing under the hood, the what is a virtual audio cable guide explains the concept clearly.