Virtual Signal Routing for MacOS

[MikeRivers]

The reason for this possibly dumb question: I'm a Windows user. I don't even know enough about a Mac to get myself in trouble

 

The project: I'm working on a series of articles that roughly follow my series on specifications. The new series is about testing audio devices to see how close they come to meeting their published specifications and to learn more about the device that may not be published. It's not intended to be lab-accurate - nobody's going to sue for non-performance with the information that they gather, but they might get a better sense of things like what an equalizer's frequency response looks like when they twiddle this knob or that. Testing will be with inexpensive or free hardware and/or software.

 

One of the tools that I'm showing is Room EQ Wizard (REW). It's great for plotting frequency response and measuring harmonic distortion. The plots over the full frequency range of each harmonic of the test frequency are quite educational. The simple setup is to connect the output of an audio interface to the input of the device you're testing, then connect the device's output to the input of the input, tell REW to use those interface I/O ports, and run the test.

 

The "but" is the users who sold all of their hardware and only use software plug-ins. In Windows, I can use Virtual Audio Cable to plumb the output of REW into a DAW track with a plug-in, then plug the DAW output back into REW and measure a plug-in just like it was a piece of hardware. Guitar amplifier simulators can be pretty interesting.

 

So, I know that anything connected to a Mac that looks like an audio device is visible in the audio/MIDI setup. Does this mean that it's possible to hook REW up to a DAW track on a Mac without any external help? How complicated or simple is it? Will any Mac user who knows how to tell his DAW tracks where to take their input and where to send their output know how to include REW's input and output in the chain? Or do you gotta know sumthin'? Or is there a Virtual Audio Cable for Mac that will work just like how I describe the Windows setup?

 

I posted this query on another forum and got a few answers that I don't understand. One was "Soundflower." Apparently this originally came from (or was supported by) the Cycling 74 folks, who are usually pretty trustworthy, but someone else has taken it over and it looks like you have to really know something about Mac OS in order to install and use it. That might be beyond the people I'm writing for. Another suggestion is Jack for MacOS, but I have the same reservation about that. A third suggestion was Dante Via, equally obscure, at least for someone like me who doesn't know Macs.

 

This is a really cool concept and I'd like to include Mac users if it's not too complicated - or maybe the Windows version is overly complicated and I just don't realize it.