Posted By Paul Kafasis on June 15th, 2018

Way back in 2010, we told World Cup fans about how to reduce the annoying sound of vuvuzelas while streaming games online. The most-watched tournament in the world is back, and so are the vuvuzelas. Fortunately, there’s still a great and easy solution for enjoying World Cup 2018 in relative peace: VuvuX.

Hear the Difference

Fortunately, in the twenty first century, better living through audio processing is possible. The free VuvuX plugin was released by the now-defunct Prosoniq way back in 2010, to help with this very problem. You can easily hear the difference with this clip:

In this recording, the Vuvux plugin was toggled twice (right after “evening” as well as near the end), and the difference is incredible. Using Vuvux, you can cut down on background noise and actually hear the commentary.

Downloading and Installing

The original site for the VuvuX plugin is no longer online, and the plugin seems to have been abandoned. We’re re-hosting a copy of VuvuX, so that others can benefit from this orphaned work.

Click here to download VuvuX

Once you’ve download VuvuX, it’s a snap to install on your Mac. Just follow these steps:

1) Go to the Finder and click the Go menu in the menu bar. Select the “Go to Folder…” command.

2) Enter the following location into the field:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components

3) Move the VuvuX.component file to this folder.

That’s all you need to do to make the plugin available to all apps on your Mac that load Audio Units.¹

Using VuvuX

The VuvuX plugin will work with any modern Audio Unit host on your Mac, but for removing audio from streamed games, we recommend our own Audio Hijack. Once you’ve installed it on your Mac (as explained above), restart Audio Hijack. You’ll then find VuvuX in the “Audio Unit Effects” section of Audio Hijack’s Library. Add the plugin in the middle of any audio chain, and it will adjust your audio.²

Above, you can see VuvuX being used to adjust audio streaming through Safari, quieting the vuvuzelas then playing the audio out to the Mac’s internal speakers. That’s really all it takes. Happy listening!

Footnotes:

1. If you’d like to install the plugin solely for your user, it can alternately be placed in ~/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/Components. ↩︎

2. When first initialized, the plugin will send your web browser to the now-defunct vuvux.com. Unfortunately, this action is caused by the plugin itself, and can’t be prevented. ↩︎