Menubus (mac)

[plexuss]

I figure this should go in this forum. It concerns Menubus, a mac app that allows a system-wide plugin chain. Useful for using speaker calibration plugins, main buss limters and otherwise putting plugins and doing other audio manipulations on the system audio stream.

The only other app I have found that does this is Audio Hijack but I find it often sounds harsh. Turns out Rogue Amoeba don't consider this important - they have acknowledges the issue to me in email but think it's acceptible for the app.

So that leaves Menubus which came out a couple years ago. It works pretty well and sounds great. But then what does Rogue Amoeba do, they hire the Menubus developer who then officially stops development of Menubus.

Sigh.

Sociopathic capitalists suck. Well as long as the last iteration of Menubus works that's fine. I simply can not use Audio Hijack for any serious audio work. Apparently Menubus is for sale... someone should snatch it up and massage it into the great app it has potential to be.

[Robert Randolph]

What did they acknowledge about the ‘harsh’ sound?

[plexuss]

What did they acknowledge about the ‘harsh’ sound?

I think a part of the problem is poor SRC in Audio Hijack - to my ears the harshness is something I've heard with poor SRC algorithms. I don't know enough about the DSP of these things but I do know that there are better quality SRC algorithms out there (such as Goodhertz which licenses their technology out to other developers [eg. Myriad]) and when I use something with a purported better SRC approach such as Goodhertz it does sound better than what I get out of Audio Hijack.

More generally they acknowledge that Audio Hijack is not bit perfect. I would run an audio stream through it with no processing and it would sound harsh coming out the other end.

The artifacts imposed by Audio Hijack became apparent after I started working it with it while mastering. I was using it as a system-wide processor so i could put Sonarworks speaker calibration on the main system audio so all audio would go through it. It sounded harsher and weirder than if I excluding Audio Hijack and ran the audio through Sonarworks in Logic. Also if I ran a bounce through Sonarworks in a file player vs using Audio Hijack. This is what alerted me to a possible problem, essentially acknowledged by Rogue Amoeba.

On Nov 14, 2015, at 5:35 PM, Rogue Amoeba <audiohijack@rogueamoeba.com> wrote:
Hi,

Thanks for following up with us. Audio Hijack is going to be as bit perfect as possible for application and audio device sources (again, System Audio is currently 44.1 kHz only), but this depends on your source audio, input/output device settings, and whether or not you've applied effects. Unfortunately there can be timing issues that can affect Audio Hijack's ability to stay true, but given the customizability we get as close as we can -- we can't guarantee bit perfect accuracy at all times. You could try seeing if any other devices connected to your Mac are affecting things - if you run things with your MacBook Pro's built-in mic and speakers, set to match everything, without connecting additional audio devices, you may notice more reliable results.

Rogue Amoeba

[Snobe]

Ehh, after upgrading to Mojave, menuBUS stopped working for me.
And there is no real, free, stable alternative

Audio Hijack Pro is totally overpriced. It costs almost the same as basic version of DAW Software like FL Studio and Cubase. It's a quite nice app guys, but seriously, 70 EUR for this?
Please make some simple version without all the recording capabilities, just master bus with VST/AU plugins and that's enough!

If anyone knows some free, stable aternative that allows to run au/vst plugins on master bus, I would be very grateful for the information.

[Tj Shredder]

What about Dante Via? Has the advantage to route audio even through other computers... Another approach could be a loopback through spdif. You could send the output of your DAW to spdif, and then take for example Mainstage to host your calibration...

[sprnva]

Before I heard of menuBUS I was using an aggregate audio device with soundflower and AU Lab to achieve something similar. It wasn't as solid but it was free.