BlackHole vs Loopback, and when you need neither

BlackHole is free and leaves the wiring to you. Loopback is $99, does the wiring in a graphical patchbay, and can capture the audio of one specific application — which is the one thing BlackHole structurally cannot do. If all you want is a recording of a meeting, there is a third answer where you install no driver at all.

Prices below were read from Rogue Amoeba’s own purchase pages today, because their main store page has been returning “Our store appears to be having processing issues” and shows no numbers.

The short version

BlackHole: free, and the plumbing is yours

BlackHole describes itself as “a modern macOS virtual audio loopback driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency”. It appears as an output device and as an input device. Send sound to it, record from it.

You will not want to send only to it, because then you hear nothing. So the standard setup is a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup containing your real speakers plus BlackHole, and there are two gotchas the project documents itself:

• “due to issues with macOS the Built-in Output must be enabled and listed as the top device in the Multi-Output”
• drift correction on every member device except the one acting as clock source

Then, if you also want your own voice in the recording, you build an Aggregate Device on top of the Multi-Output. Apple’s own description of an aggregate is that multiple devices appear as a single device to an app — which sounds like it mixes them. It does not. From BlackHole’s own discussion thread, where someone was trying to combine system audio with a Yeti: “an aggregate does not mix them”, and “You need to record all channels”. Their recording app handled two channels, the aggregate had five, so the two sources could not both arrive. That is the mechanism behind most “why is the right side silent” posts.

None of this is hard. It is just a checklist you have to be correct about every time, and a set of settings you have to remember to put back.

Loopback: $99, and per-app routing is what you’re buying

Loopback’s pitch is that you don’t touch Audio MIDI Setup at all: “Pull audio from multiple sources into one virtual device! Just add the applications and physical audio devices you want to include.”

That word applications is the whole argument for paying. Loopback’s manual describes configuring a virtual device to “pull in audio from specific audio sources (both applications and physical devices)", and application sources get their own control: a Mute when capturing checkbox, on by default, so “when the virtual audio device is in use, audio from the application source will not be played through”. Channel mapping is automatic by default and adjustable.

What that buys you, concretely:

• Record Safari and nothing else. Your Slack notifications stay out of the file.
• Record one app plus a specific microphone, on channels you assign, without hand-building an aggregate.
• A Pass-Thru device, which “allows you to pass audio directly from one application to another, with almost no configuration required”.

BlackHole cannot do the first two. It is a device, not a router; it captures whatever the system sends to it.

Current version is 2.4.10, released 7 May 2026, “For MacOS 14.5 to 26”. The trial runs with limitations until you buy. Rogue Amoeba’s sibling app Audio Hijack is "$69 USD” and is the better fit if what you actually want is a recorder with effects and file output rather than a routing layer; the two together are "$134 USD”.

Soundflower: check the repository, not the listicles

Every “record internal audio on Mac” listicle still mentions Soundflower. The repository settles it without any interpretation needed. The GitHub page carries the notice:

“DEPRECATED Silicon Macs are not supported. New version coming shortly!”

The newest release, tagged 2.0b2, was published in December 2014 and titled “Signed Version for macOS Big Sur (11.1) and earlier”. Its notes say “M1 chip-based Macs are NOT YET SUPPORTED”. The most recent commit to the repository is dated 7 December 2024, and it edited the README.

So: “new version coming shortly” has been on that page for a while, and the promise is eleven years old at this point. Soundflower shipped as a kernel extension, which is the category Apple has been closing off, and that is why BlackHole exists. Don’t install it on a current Mac.

The setup burden, side by side

Both routes end with you as the audio engineer. That is fine when audio is the job — a podcast, a screencast, a stream, anything landing in Logic or OBS. It is a poor fit for something you do three times a day for four years.

Option three: an app that holds the permission

macOS has a privacy control for exactly this. In current versions the panel is named Screen & System Audio Recording, and an app can be granted audio without screen. An app that asks for it reads the output stream where it already is: no driver, no Multi-Output Device, no Aggregate, no output switching, nothing to put back afterwards.

Narada works this way. It uses a CoreAudio process tap for system output and opens the microphone separately, so a meeting arrives as two files rather than one mixed one — which is what makes the transcript able to say your lines were yours. It never asks for Screen Recording, because it isn’t recording pixels. Transcription runs on the Mac with Parakeet TDT v3.

Now the cost of this route, which is real:

• It captures for itself. There is no virtual device to point OBS, Logic, Audacity or Zoom at. If your workflow needs the audio going into another app live, this option cannot do it and Loopback can.
• No per-app isolation. It hears the whole system output, same as BlackHole. If you need Safari without Slack, buy Loopback.
• No routing, no monitoring, no channel map. It is one app recording, not an audio graph you can shape.
• Speaker labels have no names. The call’s audio is split into Speaker 1, Speaker 2; the app will not guess who they are, and a mic-only or in-person recording gets no speaker separation at all.
• macOS 15.6 or newer, Mac only. No live transcription during the meeting, no translation, no global hotkey, no iPhone app. On-device AI needs Apple Silicon and a one-time 3 GB or 7 GB model download, produces lighter notes than the cloud route, and pauses while a recording is running.
• Transcription covers 25 European languages, unevenly — the engine’s published benchmark runs from about 4% word error rate on Italian to about 37% on Greek. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi and Turkish are not supported.

One more thing worth saying, because it is true of every route on this page: macOS audio can fail mid-recording. A device reshaped under a live capture, an overloaded audio daemon, a microphone that quietly stops delivering frames. Narada compares each finished recording against what was submitted to the writer and marks it Incomplete with a reason when they disagree. It cannot recover audio that was never written — no software can. A tool that never warns you isn’t necessarily doing better; it may just not be checking.

Which one, for which job

If you’re here because a recording came out silent or one-sided, the cause is usually the aggregate-channel problem above rather than the driver choice: both sides of a call, properly.

And whichever route you take, it does not make the recording lawful. This is not legal advice and nobody selling software is qualified to give you any — but rules vary by country and by state, and in some places the standard is that everyone agreed rather than that nobody objected (more on that here). Say out loud that you’re recording. It takes four seconds.

Sources

All read on 4 August 2026.

• Rogue Amoeba: Purchase Loopback ($99 USD, $49 upgrade, $134 bundle), Purchase Audio Hijack ($69 USD), Loopback product page (version 2.4.10, 7 May 2026, “For MacOS 14.5 to 26”, trial limitations, Pass-Thru), Loopback manual — Sources (application sources, Mute when capturing, channel mapping). The main store page showed no prices and reported “Our store appears to be having processing issues.”
• BlackHole: existential.audio/blackhole (free, the $10 donation suggestion, “Built for Intel and Apple Silicon”, “Compatible with macOS Mavericks (10.10) and newer”, the 2/16/64-channel versions), GitHub README (zero added latency, the Multi-Output ordering and drift-correction caveats), issue #41 (sample rate does not follow the source), discussion #716 (“an aggregate does not mix them”, “You need to record all channels”).
• Soundflower: github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower (the DEPRECATED notice), and its releases — newest tag 2.0b2 published 19 December 2014, “M1 chip-based Macs are NOT YET SUPPORTED”; latest commit 7 December 2024, a README edit.
• Apple: Combine multiple audio devices (what an Aggregate Device is).
• Narada: the macOS 15.6 minimum and the on-device model sizes from its App Store listing and in-app settings. Per-language word error rates from the FLEURS benchmark table published with FluidAudio 0.13.4, the transcription package Narada ships. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio/main/Documentation/Benchmarks.md