I use several of Rogue Amoeba’s apps on a near-daily basis. They are critical to my work as a podcaster, and my Mac would be noticeably less useful without them.
With the transition to Apple silicon, installing these programs became much more complicated, and I feared that Apple was pushing tools like Audio Hijack, Loopback, and others off the platform.
In the background, it seems like the folks at Rogue Amoeba were living in fear as well:
Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent. When we spoke briefly to Apple during WWDC 2020, our appeals for assistance were flatly rejected.1 We spent weeks attempting to get ACE working again, but eventually we had to admit defeat. ACE as we knew it was dead in the water, and all options for replacing it involved substantial reductions in functionality. Though we did not discuss it publicly at the time, things looked grim for the future of our products.
Thankfully, cooler heads in Cupertino prevailed, and a two-step plan was discussed. ACE would be given a stay of execution, even if users had to jump through a bunch of hoops to install it.
The second step has finally come to fruition. Here is Paul Kafasis again:
That brings us to the beginning of this year, when the two-part plan first proposed in 2020 was finally nearing completion. With that in mind, we announced our intention to streamline the first-run experience for all of our audio capture apps. We promised that soon, the painful setup process would be a thing of the past.
We thought we could see the finish line, but we had really only completed the first 90% of our work. We still had to complete the second 90%, transitioning our apps to use ARK, our next-generation audio capture backend. This involved many more months of working around myriad issues, reporting bugs to Apple, and waiting for MacOS updates to fix them. For those of us here at Rogue Amoeba, this past year was a very long one indeed.
Installing Rogue Amoeba’s apps is now much simpler for those running macOS 14 or later, and I’d bet everyone at Rogue Amoeba is sleeping much better now.