ACE is the audio handling component which powers these applications, making it possible for them to capture and adjust audio from other apps on your Mac.On MacOS 11 (Big Sur), installing ACE for the first time requires authorizing it with the OS, and on M1 chip-based Macs, that setup has a few extra steps. If you use Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Loopback, Piezo, or SoundSource, you may already be familiar with the name 'ACE'.

And that's going to take a little messing around. An announcement post explains that getting the new apps to work will mean manually enabling the ACE audio handling component that they need. (For more elaborate sound routing with options for professionals, Rogue Amoeba offers Loopback see my review of Loopback 2.All of these apps have betas ready to go right now, but the developer points out that there is a caveat that needs to be taken into consideration. The app can take its input from any running app or any other app you select, from any audio input source on your computer, and from special system inputs, which can include something like passing text to speech to a particular device. You can tweak the Sync slider for each destination while music is playing to avoid the highly disconcerting sound of out-of-phase playback.Īirfoil includes a 10-band equalizer with a variety of presets to match different styles of music and spoken-word audio. The Advanced Speaker Options dialog in the Speakers menu helps with a common problem: keeping sound in sync with all the potential delays across different networking methods. You can also build groups of speakers to target a preferred set of destinations with a single click. Airfoil lets you manually select multiple speakers and targets, controlling the volume of each individually.

Airfoil audio quality