The simplest workaround I’ve found is to switch back to the speaker device (recommended to turn on “Show volume in menu bar” enabled so you can switch from the menu bar), change the volume, then switch back to the Multi-Output Device. Note that while the Multi-Output Device is selected, the speaker volume controls won’t work as usual. If not, you can skip this section.Īt the bottom left, create a new Multi-Output Device.Īnd for the new multi-output device, select the devices you want audio to play through to.Īnd finally back in Sound System Preferences, set the output device to Multi-Output Device. in addition to streaming it to another computer. This step is only necessary if you want to hear the audio output from your speakers/headphones/etc. Soundflower installs a virtual audio device that you can find in the Output and Input section of the Sound System Preferences:īy selecting Soundflower in the Output section, all the sound that would normally come out of the speakers/headphones/etc. It seems to be “barely” maintained these days, but its functionality still works on macOS Catalina. The only free program I’ve found to do this on a Mac is Soundflower. I needed some way to redirect the Mac’s audio output to its input so that VLC could capture it. Instead, I found that VLC could get me down to just under 1 second of latency, which still isn’t great but is workable at least the server setup wouldn’t be required simplifying things a bit. I was already familiar with Icecast, a free audio streaming server, so I gave that a try first, but it was not a great experience with a delay of a few to several seconds. However, sometimes I would like to play some audio from my Mac laptop (which could be anywhere in my apartment). My particular case is that I have a wireless headphone set plugged in to my desktop computer in my living room.

One of these is that VLC can send audio as a stream. However, it has a lot of advanced functionality that many people may not know about. VLC is a very popular program for playing pretty much any type of media under the sun.

Vlc for mac desktop