In September of last year, we unveiled our newest app, Intermission. With Intermission, you can pause and rewind live audio on your Mac. That means you can pause any audio while you take a call, answer the door, or use the restroom. You can even pause streaming audio on services like Pandora and Spotify to build a buffer, then skip right past the ads and songs you don’t want to hear! If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out.

We’ve been working hard on enhancing the underpinnings of Intermission, and we’re pleased to release version 1.1 today. This update brings several key improvements. First, Intermission has been heavily optimized, reducing its energy usage dramatically. Mother Earth will thank you for updating!

In addition, we’ve improved the way Intermission handles audio. Previously, Intermission could introduce a small amount of latency in live playback. Now, because Intermission removes itself from the audio pipeline entirely during live playback, it causes no latency at all. While this change was extremely complex to implement, the updated design is cleaner and better all around.

Finally, we’ve improved the way Intermission works with higher-end mixers and multi-channel audio output devices. During live playback, Intermission will no longer interfere with these devices in any way, which is a very good thing. Further, all non-stereo audio output devices (such as those higher-end mixers and more) will now also work better with Intermission when it’s playing back non-live audio.

All in all, Intermission should now work flawlessly with far more setups. Couple all that with a myriad of other fixes including improvements with Fast User Switching, and you’ve got a great overall improvement.

Get It Now

If you’ve already got Intermission you can update immediately from the Preferences window. Just click the “Check for Update” button to get the latest. You can also download it directly, of course.

If you’re new to Intermission read all about on the Intermission page, then grab the free trial to take it for a test drive.

Update (March 26th, 2019): With the release of SoundSource 4, we now have a tool expressly designed for routing audio playback from different applications to different outputs. Check it out here.

This post is preserved in its entirety for historical purposes.

If you work with audio on your Mac, it’s likely you have multiple audio outputs hooked up. If so, this tip is for you. With the help of Audio Hijack Pro, you can route audio from different applications to different outputs. That means you can do things like sending your music to one output, such as a good set of USB speakers, while other audio continues to play through your Mac’s built-in speakers. Nice!

The folks over at iDownload Blog have a helpful post explaining just how to accomplish this. Their quick video shows exactly how to get your audio routed just as you desire. While Audio Hijack Pro wasn’t designed with this idea specifically in mind, it’s more than powerful enough to help you get this functionality. If you’re interested, download a free trial of Audio Hijack Pro to test it out.

Fuzzy Memories

Rogue Amoeba fans who’ve been with us since the beginning may have fuzzy memories of a product we once made called Detour, which performed a similar function. While that product was ultimately discontinued almost nine years ago, we know there are plenty of people who want to send audio from specific apps to different audio outputs. With this tip and Audio Hijack Pro, you can do just that.