Posted By Neale Van Fleet on December 6th, 2024

When I began working at Rogue Amoeba in 2015, the company’s mascot Ammo the Amoeba was front and centre on our website. He served as the logo, and sat in the site navigation at the top of every single page.

The next year, we introduced our more subtle current logo as part of a rebranding and Ammo took a step back from the limelight. Even though he is no longer seen on every page of our site, Ammo hasn’t gone away entirely. As readers of this blog or our mailing list may recognize, he continues to pop up in various forms. He’s also served a role on the 404 error page that appears if you try to visit a page on our site which doesn’t exist.

Over the years, I’ve had fun making many iterations of Ammo:

Ammo is also alluded to frequently in our documentation, in the form of “Ammo’s <Device>” in documentation screenshots. In fact, I was using the name so much when taking screenshots that I literally just changed the names of my own devices. Now, my main Mac and iPhone are called “Ammo’s Mac” and “Ammo’s Phone”, respectively. That’s only a little ridiculous.

The truly eagle-eyed might even have noticed the appearance of the name “Ammette” in a few spots in our documentation. She’s quite rare, but she has been pictured at least once. You’ll have to find that yourself.

One of my personal favourite forms of Ammo is the real-world plush version created way back in 2005. My gigantic 90-pound Bernese mountain dog Aji usually tears apart dog toys in seconds, with a ferocity matched only by his love of pie. When it comes to Ammo, however, he must understand how much the plushie means to me. Aji gently carries it around like a little baby, slobbery but otherwise unharmed.

With Ammo appearing in so many different fun forms, we thought it would be neat to collect as many of them as we could find and put them into a single gallery. That’s now a special exhibition in our Historic Screenshot Archive. To check out all the amoeba-y goodness that is our mascot Ammo, click the priceless works of art below:

Posted By Neale Van Fleet on November 15th, 2024

Here at Rogue Amoeba, we recently completed an overhaul of the first-run experience of our audio capture apps. Until just a few months ago, the process for installing Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Loopback, Piezo, and SoundSource was much more complex than we wanted, due to changes made by Apple in 2020. In fact, our walkthrough document for the process contained 20 discrete steps, which was certainly not ideal.

Luckily, we’ve replaced that difficult first-run experience with a far friendlier setup window, one which needs no separate documentation at all. It’s a huge improvement, keeping our users informed while also maintaining the approachability we want our apps to have.

This change provides a dramatically improved experience, and we wanted to bring it to the attention of folks who had been scared off by the previous process. But how exciting, really, can you make a permissions window?

I have a little design game I sometimes play when I’m stuck on something. Instead of thinking “What is the best way to do something?” (which is sometimes not that clear) I instead think “What would be the worst way to do this?”. Exploring the negative often helps expose a useful contrast, and it can sometimes lead me to the best way to do something. I decided to apply that little mental exercise to how we’d show off our new and much improved setup experience. As a child of the 80’s, I immediately thought that the worst way to install our software would be via floppy disk —the install medium that existed when I first started using computers. The floppies would of course come in a box, and be purchased in person a retail computer store.

As you can see above, I started by mocking up just the boxes. Soon, though, I got carried away reimagining as many different antiquated installation mediums as I could. This brought some genuine heartfelt nostalgia.

In roughly reverse chronological order, we start with SoundSource on CD-ROM:

Loopback on 3.5” floppy (requiring 25 disks):

Audio Hijack on 5.25” floppy (requiring 181 disks):

Airfoil on cassette:

And most silly of all was Piezo on about 150,000 punch cards:

I really enjoyed rendering each of these retro mediums in detail. Each was painstakingly hand-rendered as a 2D vector-based image. The stickers, boxes, and labels were first rendered out into flattened image files, and then passed through a halftone pattern filter to create a genuine printed look, before being brought back into my vector drawing app. It can be hard to see this detail from images used on social media, so here’s a zoomed-in view of the SoundSource CD:

As lovably retro as these installation mediums would be, they certainly wouldn’t be convenient. I’m grateful that the new much-simplified setup window is paired with incredibly simple download buttons on our site.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on October 29th, 2024

On Monday, Apple shipped the first major update to MacOS 15 (Sequoia). In addition to the premiere of Apple Intelligence, MacOS 15.1 includes important audio-related bug fixes. Here’s a look at several improvements you can expect to find with our products once you’ve updated to MacOS 15.1:

• Capture from iPhone Mirroring
  Capturing audio from Apple’s new “iPhone Mirroring” application now works as expected.

  For: Airfoil Audio Hijack Loopback Piezo SoundSource

• Capture of audio from command-line interface (CLI) tools
  Audio capture from command-line processes now works as expected. Whether you’re targeting the Terminal for a process like `mpv` or `say` or an app that uses a command-line utility under the hood, audio will once again be correctly captured

  For: Airfoil Audio Hijack Loopback Piezo SoundSource

• Correct muting with System-Wide Audio captures
  After a System-Wide Audio capture has been initiated, apps launched will now always be properly muted.

  For: Airfoil Audio Hijack

• Greatly reduced CPU usage
  Thanks to fixes in the Mac’s “CoreAudio” system, SoundSource now uses minimal processing power when no applications are playing audio.

  For: SoundSource

• Improvements for apps running in exclusive (“hog”) mode
  Previously, if an app was hogging an audio device, attempting to work with it could cause all audio capture to fail. That is no longer the case.

  For: SoundSource

Update Now

We have long advised taking it slow when upgrading to a major new version of MacOS (from MacOS 14 to MacOS 15, for instance). In the case of this smaller update from MacOS 15.0 to MacOS 15.1, though, we heartily recommend updating your Mac now. As always, we also recommend using the latest versions of our own products. Select Check for Updates from within the app to get those.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on September 21st, 2024

We’ve recently updated our sound control utility SoundSource, and it’s a big leap forward. On top of a wealth of assorted improvements and bug fixes, there are two notable advances.

First, SoundSource is now dramatically simpler to install on your Mac. There’s no longer any need to adjust startup security settings, nor even restart your Mac a single time. You can get started in seconds.

Second, SoundSource has support for MacOS 15 (Sequoia). If you’ve already updated your Mac to Sequoia, you can now run SoundSource on it.

You can download the latest right from the SoundSource product page. For more details about this update, read on.

Simplified Setup

SoundSource is now powered by our next-generation audio capture backend, “ARK”. Thanks to ARK, you can start using SoundSource in under a minute, with a new, streamlined setup process.

When you launch SoundSource on MacOS 14.5 and higher¹, the app will walk you through the necessary setup. With a few clicks, you’ll install the ARK plugin, grant the necessary permissions, and be up and running.

This change is the result of many months of development, as extensive work was required to overhaul the app’s backend. Despite those huge changes under the hood, we worked diligently to ensure existing users experience minimal changes in functionality. SoundSource remains the most powerful utility for audio adjustment on your Mac, and now, getting started with it is a snap.

Update SoundSource Now

If you’re already a SoundSource user, all you need to do is choose Check for Updates from the SoundSource menu to update to the latest version for your system.

If you’re not currently using SoundSource, visit the product page to learn more and download the free trial. It’s never been so easy to take control of all the audio on your Mac.

Footnotes:

1. The new audio capture backend requires MacOS 14.5 or higher, so SoundSource currently has two variants, with nearly identical functionality. On MacOS 14.5 and up, SoundSource 5.7.1 is the current version, while MacOS 14.4.1 and lower uses SoundSource 5.6.4.

   You don’t have to worry about that, however. All you have to do is download, and SoundSource will take care of making sure you have the right variant for your Mac. ↩︎

Posted By Paul Kafasis on September 18th, 2024

With Monday’s update to SoundSource, our entire product lineup now offers support for MacOS 15 (Sequoia). While it’s always wise to exercise caution in updating your Mac’s operating system, you won’t need to delay due to our apps. Make sure you have our latest versions, and you’ll be set to update your Mac to Sequoia.

Better Beta Cycles

When the first developer preview appeared back in June, we were thrilled to have five of our seven products already functional on Sequoia. Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Farrago, Fission, and Piezo were all capable of running on the new OS without needing any updates. By contrast, Loopback and SoundSource required most of the summer to gain Sequoia support. Eventually, though, they too were able to support Sequoia in advance of its release.

This required an immense amount of hard work from our entire team. We’ve spent much of the past two years overhauling the backend of all our audio capture apps to use our next-generation capture system, which we call “ARK”. In addition to the greatly simplified setup ARK affords, it also gives us the ability to support new OSes sooner.¹

In the past, it was not viable to provide updated versions of our products until near the end of Apple’s beta cycle. Thanks to ARK, the future looks brighter. If Apple follows their standard beta process next year, we hope to be able to provide updates that work on previews of MacOS 16 (Rancho Cucamonga?) earlier than ever.

This is also a good spot to once again link to our helpful Status page, which provides the most up-to–date information on compatibility with various operating system versions. This page is updated year-round, so if any of our tools are crucial to your setup, consider bookmarking the Status page to check before installing any major OS updates.

Happy Updating

As folks begin to update their Macs to Sequoia, we’re watching for any issues. We’re also working hard on further improvements, which we expect to ship in the weeks ahead. For now, though, we’re just thrilled to be ready for Sequoia after a long summer of work and testing. Make sure you have our latest versions, and after that, happy updating!

Footnotes:

1. I’ll also mention that ARK is available for licensing. If you have a Mac app that can benefit from audio capture, see our Licensing page for more information. ↩︎