Release notes

Maintenance release.

• Internal changes only. Nothing about capturing, recording or the plug-in has changed since 1.2.8.

Recording chosen apps now matches recording the whole system, on every interface.

• On an interface with more than two outputs, recording chosen apps came back as much as 24 dB quieter than recording system audio. It now arrives at the same level, and where your interface carries the audio on its main output pair, that pair is captured exactly instead of as a mixdown.
• Changing your output device in the middle of a recording no longer leaves the rest of the take silent. AudioRoute follows the new device and carries on.
• Settings now has a capture path for each interface. Leave it on Automatic and AudioRoute measures and chooses, or pin it to one output pair or to all outputs mixed. The choice is remembered for that interface and AudioRoute will not override it.
• A recording could stop a fraction of a second after it started, leaving a file with almost nothing in it, if AudioRoute happened to be checking its audio permission at that moment. It no longer stops a recording it did not start.

The plug-in window no longer cuts off its own controls.

• With a recorded take on screen, opening Advanced pushed the Gain slider below the bottom edge of the plug-in window, and the window could not be grown or scrolled to reach it. The window now sizes itself to whatever it is showing, so Advanced opens in full however much else is on screen.

On interfaces with more than two outputs, AudioRoute now checks that it is recording what you are actually hearing, and corrects itself when it is not.

• AudioRoute used to capture only the single stereo pair your Mac reports playing to, which is exact when that pair carries the music and silent or very quiet when it does not. It now listens to that pair and to the full stereo mix at the same time, compares them, and keeps the exact pair only when it genuinely matches. Recordings that came back silent, or far quieter than what you were monitoring, should simply not happen on this build.
• The check runs on every recording instead of once per device, so an interface that works today and stops tomorrow is caught in the same take rather than at playback. AudioRoute remembers which path worked on each device and starts there next time, but still re-checks before trusting it.
• If you had switched "Capture main outputs only" off to work around quiet recordings, you can leave it off. AudioRoute now reaches the same result by itself.
• Crash reports on macOS are now written by a separate process, so a crash inside a plug-in can no longer destroy its own report while the host is unloading it.

Recordings that came back silent now recover on their own, and the input device works at every sample rate up to 384 kHz.

• On an interface with more than two outputs, AudioRoute records the exact pair your Mac plays to. When that pair turned out to carry nothing, the recording was silent and nothing said so. AudioRoute now notices within seconds, finishes the take through the full stereo mix instead, and remembers that device so the next recording starts on the path that works. It re-tests on every launch, so a device that starts working again goes back to exact capture by itself.
• Recording at 96 kHz through the AudioRoute input device captured about half of what you played, and nothing indicated it. The device changed its sample rate without the handshake that makes macOS re-read it, so audio was collected at 48 kHz however the device was configured.
• The input device now offers 88.2, 176.4, 192, 352.8 and 384 kHz as well as 44.1, 48 and 96.
• Export Logs in Settings now produces a file. It looked for the logs in a folder that does not exist, found nothing and opened an empty window, so it has never worked. If support has ever asked you for logs and the button gave you nothing, this was why.
• Settings now shows which way AudioRoute is capturing on a multi-channel interface, and says so plainly if it had to switch for you.

The recording shortcut no longer takes Cmd-Shift-R away from Ableton Live.

• The default shortcut was Cmd-Shift-R, which is the Export Audio shortcut in Ableton Live. AudioRoute registers its shortcut system-wide, so Export quietly stopped working on every Mac we were installed on. The new default is Ctrl-Option-R. If you already use AudioRoute nothing moves: the shortcut you have now is kept exactly as it is, including the old default.
• Choosing a shortcut now tells you what it accepts. The field said "Press any key..." and then ignored anything that was not a letter or digit held with Cmd, Ctrl or Option, without saying why. It now states the rule before you start, explains a key it refused, and Backspace clears the shortcut if you would rather have none at all.
• The shortcut shown at the top of the panel is clickable and opens the setting that changes it.
• AudioRoute is 29 EUR until 15 October and 39 EUR from the 16th. The app shows whichever price applies, so the number you see is the number checkout charges.

Uninstalling from Settings now works, and recording no longer stops working for good after a crash.

• Uninstall from Settings now removes AudioRoute. It asked for your password and then stopped the app that was waiting for it to finish, so nothing was removed, nothing was reported, and the log looked as though you had never clicked it. Running the uninstaller from Terminal always worked, which is why this went unnoticed for so long.
• Settings stays reachable when the background service is not running. The button was hidden along with the rest of the panel, and the uninstaller lives behind it, so taking AudioRoute out of Login Items left you no way to remove it.
• Recording no longer stops working for good after a crash. Each part that reads the captured audio takes one of a limited number of connections, and a plug-in host that crashed never handed its connection back. Enough crashes and nothing could record at all until the background service was restarted, with nothing on screen explaining why. Abandoned connections are now reclaimed.

Set a level for each app you record, before it reaches the file.

• Every app you tick in the Source picker now has its own fader. Record the call and the backing track together and get the balance right at the source, instead of discovering afterwards that one of them buried the other. Once several apps are mixed into one recording there is no fixing it in post, which is why this belongs at capture time.
• Levels only ever turn a source down, never up, so balancing what you are recording cannot clip the result. Silence is the bottom of the fader rather than a separate mute that can disagree with it.
• The picker widens when you open it so the faders fit, and hands the width straight back when you close it. The panel you glance at stays the size it was.
• The levels are shared, like the app selection already was: set them in the plug-in and the menu-bar recorder and the "AudioRoute Input" device follow, because there is one capture running and one set of levels on it.
• When a capture is refused for a reason that will never change, AudioRoute now stops asking instead of retrying in the background for as long as the app is open.

The app you pick is now what every part of AudioRoute records, and the things that used to fail in silence now say so.

• The Source picker now governs the "AudioRoute Input" device as well as the plug-in and the menu-bar recorder. Pick Zoom, then record through AudioRoute Input in Audacity, QuickTime or OBS, and you get Zoom. The device used to ignore the picker and hand over the whole system mix, which made the choice you had just made look broken.
• When the apps you picked are not running, AudioRoute tells you instead of handing over silence: a line in the panel, an amber dot on the menu-bar icon, and a notification with a "Use system audio" button so you can carry on without going looking for the settings.
• Recording no longer refuses when the folder you chose cannot be written to. It falls through to Music and then Documents, and tells you once where the take actually went, rather than failing at the moment you pressed Record.
• "AudioRoute Input" stays open and keeps asking when it has nothing to record, and says so in the host'"'"'s own device list, instead of appearing available and delivering nothing.
• Installing now works out for itself whether the audio driver needs reloading, by looking at the driver it just installed rather than a number someone had to remember to change. A new driver could previously sit on disk unused until the next restart.

Record only the apps you choose, instead of everything your Mac is playing.

• There is a new Source picker in the menu-bar panel, and the same picker inside the plug-in, so you can change what is being recorded without leaving your DAW. Pick one app or several; whatever else your Mac is playing stays out of the recording.
• The list shows what is playing right now, each row with its icon, and then the apps that are running but silent — so you can tick Zoom before the call starts rather than hunting for it once everyone is talking.
• Apps are remembered by identity rather than by process, so a choice survives quitting and reopening them. The choice is shared: change it in the plug-in and the menu-bar panel follows within about a second, and the other way round.
• Sound coming from a helper process is credited to the app you recognise. Chrome, Discord and Slack all play audio from a helper with a name of its own; picking the app captures the whole family, and the list says "zoom.us" rather than "CptHost".
• If one of the apps you picked is not running when you start, the Source row names it rather than leaving you to notice afterwards that half of what you chose is missing from the take. Recording is never interrupted to pick an app up mid-capture: quit and restart the capture when you are ready for it.
• Recording the whole system mix is untouched. It takes exactly the path it always did, including the bit-perfect multichannel capture, so the picker adds a choice without changing what you already rely on.

Fixes a sample rate that got stuck after a recording, and recordings that failed the moment you pressed Record.

• "AudioRoute Input" no longer holds on to the sample rate of a recording that has already finished. The rate control in Audio MIDI Setup stayed dead long after a capture ended, and a rate you chose there would silently snap back. Because of this the virtual device had been quietly resampling; it is bit-perfect again.
• The panel now shows the rate you are actually getting. It had been showing the rate of the hardware being tapped, so it could read 48000 while you were recording a 44.1 kHz file. When the two differ, both are shown.
• Pressing Record immediately after launch could fail outright with "Failed to open shared memory". The recorder started before the background service had finished preparing, and gave up on the first miss instead of waiting the moment it needed. It now waits, and Stop still responds while it does.
• On some macOS builds, including 14.3.1, a recording could produce nothing at all: a system call AudioRoute expects is absent there, and the failure took the whole capture with it. AudioRoute now checks before using it and falls back to a stereo capture, so you get a correct recording instead of none.

Makes the level readout something you can actually read, and makes uninstalling tell you the truth.

• The dB number beside the meters used to follow the signal, changing about thirty times a second. It was unreadable, which defeated the point of having it. It now holds the loudest level it has seen for a moment before falling back, so you can play the loudest part of your material and then read what it actually reached.
• The plug-in meters have a scale underneath, marked at the points where the colour changes, so the colours state a specific level rather than just getting warmer as you get louder.
• The floating recorder is wider. Its level meter had been getting whatever space the buttons and the readout left over, which was not much; it is now more than twice as wide.
• The floating recorder can no longer reopen somewhere you cannot reach it. If you had left it near the edge of your screen, or disconnected a display since you last used it, it could come back partly or entirely off-screen, and being always on top it could not be dragged back.
• Uninstalling now tells you what happened. Cancelling it, or dismissing the password prompt, used to say nothing at all, which was indistinguishable from the uninstaller silently failing. It also checked nothing before reporting success, so it could tell you AudioRoute had been removed while the app, the daemon and the driver were all still in place. It now checks that the files are gone before it says so.

Fixes recordings that came out sped up and sharp, and rebuilds the level meters.

• A recording could come out about 9 % too fast and roughly a semitone and a half sharp. When your output device and your chosen recording rate disagreed, the audio was converted between them twice instead of once. It is converted once now, and only when it genuinely has to be.
• The level meters were close to useless. They barely moved, everything looked green whatever you played, and there was no way to tell how close you were to clipping. The bar now travels across its whole length, the colour actually means something, and the top of the scale is marked. The solid part of the bar is the average level and the dimmer tip is the peak, so you can see both at once.
• You can choose where the plug-in keeps your recordings. Previously they always went to a folder inside your user library, which is the wrong drive if your samples live elsewhere. Takes now appear there as soon as you stop recording, rather than only once you drag them out.
• The floating overlay shows the level, and says “No signal” if a recording has been silent for a few seconds, so a dead capture is obvious while it is happening rather than afterwards.
• Uninstalling and turning off “Keep my recordings” now clean up properly, including the analysis files DAWs leave beside imported audio.

Fixes an uninstall that could leave everything in place, and a leftover audio device that could stop every recording until you restarted the Mac.

• Uninstalling from Settings now actually removes AudioRoute. It could stop the app that was carrying out the removal before a single file had been deleted, or never start the removal at all, and then tell you the uninstaller “did not report a result” while everything was still on the machine.
• A leftover capture device no longer blocks recording. If AudioRoute exited uncleanly it could leave its private audio device behind, and every later recording then failed to start and retried forever, with no way out but restarting the Mac.

Stops AudioRoute insisting the System Audio Recording permission is missing after you have already granted it.

• AudioRoute could show the permission dialog on a Mac where the switch was already on, and pressing “I’ve enabled it” restarted everything only to show it again. Two parts of AudioRoute were each reaching their own verdict, and only one of them could actually see the answer. Now only that one decides, and it is the part that owns the audio.
• AudioRoute now notices if the permission is switched off while it is running, instead of trusting what it found when it started.
• After the restart that applies the permission, AudioRoute waits for itself to close fully before reopening. Previously it could fail to come back at all if a recording was still being finalised, which looked like a crash.
• The macOS permission prompt now explains in our own words why AudioRoute needs system audio, instead of showing generic wording.
• The floating recorder is now in the tray menu, one click to show or hide. Closing it with the × switched it off for good, and the only way back was a setting three levels into Settings.
• The level meter shows left and right separately. A single bar followed whichever side was louder, so a channel that had gone dead still looked like a healthy signal.

Fixes a false warning that AudioRoute could not record system audio.

• 1.1.2 could tell you the System Audio Recording permission was missing when it was switched on and working. The check listened for a test tone that was too quiet to survive some setups, and treated hearing nothing as proof. It is now louder, inaudible, and it stays silent unless it has real evidence.
• Fixed the level meters freezing after the background helper restarted. AudioRoute kept reading an audio buffer the helper had already replaced, so the meters sat at zero while recording worked normally. The same stale reading is what produced the false permission warning.
• A recording made while nothing was playing no longer triggers a permission check. Silence usually means silence.
• Exporting logs now produces a single zip on your Desktop instead of opening a folder of several hundred files.

Finds the reason recordings come out silent, instead of leaving you to guess.

• If macOS is not letting AudioRoute hear your system audio, it now detects that on launch and shows you the exact switch to turn on, with screenshots. This is the most common cause of a recording that runs for its full length and contains nothing, and until now it looked no different from a bug in AudioRoute.
• Fixed: AudioRoute’s background helper could not start at all when your home folder lives on an external drive. It now installs from the startup disk instead, so capture works on those Macs.
• Fixed: if AudioRoute had been switched off under Login Items & Extensions, it could never start again, and reinstalling did not help because that setting survives it. AudioRoute now detects this and repairs it.
• When the background helper cannot start, AudioRoute now says why, rather than only reporting that it is not running.
• During the trial, the panel now offers a direct way to buy, and entering a licence key is a visible button instead of a hidden right-click menu.

Fixes recordings that came out as a full-size file with no sound.

• A take could be written at the right length but contain silence, or audio left over from an earlier session. This happened when the plug-in connected at the moment a capture started, and it did not recover on its own for the rest of the session.
• Your capture settings are applied again at launch. Feedback Protection and Level Compensation were switched back on every time AudioRoute started, so turning either off only lasted until the next launch — which made recording look intermittent when the setting was simply being overwritten.
• Stereo Mix captures now come through at the correct level, and the setting explains what it does.
• Only tools that genuinely duplicate audio are excluded from a capture, so fewer takes come back unexpectedly silent.
• The warning shown when a take captured no audio is now legible.

A recording that captures no audio now tells you so.

• If a take runs for a few seconds and no audio reaches it, AudioRoute says so as soon as you stop, along with what to check. Previously it wrote a normal-looking file and you found out later in an editor.
• Fixed the in-app uninstall appearing to do nothing when it failed. It now reports what went wrong and how to finish. A half-finished uninstall could leave the audio device installed without the app that feeds it, which itself caused silent recordings.
• Multi-channel interfaces: recordings that come out silent can now be traced to the exact output channels involved, which is the first step to supporting those devices properly.

Fixes the AudioRoute plug-in window in Logic Pro and GarageBand.

• The AudioRoute plug-in could open as a blank window in Logic Pro and GarageBand. The editor now displays correctly in both.

AudioRoute 1.0 — now on Windows.

• AudioRoute reaches 1.0, and it’s now a true cross-platform tool: the virtual audio device and system-audio capture work on Windows as well as macOS.
• Route any app or hardware input into your DAW on either platform, with the same workflow.
• macOS: installing an update no longer triggers a “command line developer tools” prompt during setup.

A refreshed Settings window and a customisable recording icon.

• Redesigned Settings, now in its own window with a clean sidebar (Recording, Menu-bar icon, Behaviour, System).
• Make the recording indicator your own: choose a full-icon or dot style for the menu-bar icon and pick its colour.
• Update notifications now appear quietly inside AudioRoute — in the menu-bar panel and on the plug-in — instead of interrupting you.

No more doubled audio when SoundSource is running.

• Fixed echoed / doubled recordings on Macs running SoundSource or another Rogue Amoeba tool. AudioRoute now leaves their shared audio helper out of the capture, so you record the original audio once instead of the original plus their copy.
• The plug-in and the menu-bar app now show a “SoundSource excluded” badge while that is in effect, so it’s clear what was left out of the capture.
• Installing an update no longer interrupts audio in your other apps unless the AudioRoute driver itself actually changed.

AudioRoute now works in GarageBand.

• The AudioRoute Capture plug-in now captures system audio inside GarageBand and other sandboxed Audio Unit hosts, using a new sandbox-safe transport — previously it reported the background helper as offline in those apps.
• More reliable single-instance behaviour: only one copy of AudioRoute runs at a time, and relaunching brings the existing window forward.
• Clearer messaging when the capture helper can’t be reached.

Record right inside the plug-in.

• New in-plug-in recorder: capture audio directly from the AudioRoute Capture plug-in in your DAW — press record, then drag the finished clip straight out to your desktop or another track. No switching to the desktop app.
• Recording now runs on a dedicated background thread, so capture stays rock-solid even under heavy DAW load.
• Fixed the live input meter so it now tracks the signal smoothly and accurately.

• Redesigned trial screen — a cleaner, branded window with one-click checkout when your trial ends.
• Fixed a rare tray crash and a checkout button that could occasionally get stuck spinning.

• Recording no longer stops if your audio setup changes mid-capture — switching your Mac’s output device or sample rate while recording now reconfigures on the fly and keeps going.
• Streamlined installer: removed the unnecessary install-location step.
• Pro Tools is now listed in the first-run setup guide.

AudioRoute now supports Pro Tools (AAX).

The AudioRoute Capture plug-in is now available as a PACE-signed AAX plug-in, so you can capture system audio straight into a Pro Tools session — on both macOS and Windows. See the Pro Tools setup guide. This release also includes a macOS capture-startup reliability fix.

• Fixed recordings that could silently fail to start on some Macs, caused by a macOS audio-capability mismatch during capture setup.
• More reliable crash reporting for faster diagnosis of rare issues.

• When your free trial ends, getting a license is now a single click — a new Buy button opens checkout directly, instead of asking you to find the website and menu on your own.

• Multi-channel interfaces (e.g. Audient EVO16, Ableton Push 3) now capture at full, bit-perfect level by reading the exact stereo pair from the device instead of boosting after the fact.
• Fixed recordings coming out too fast or too slow after switching between audio interfaces that run at different sample rates (e.g. a 48 kHz interface and a 44.1 kHz one).

• Fixed quiet captures on multi-channel audio interfaces (e.g. Audient EVO16, Ableton Push 3). AudioRoute now compensates for the level drop macOS applies when the default output device has more than two channels, so recordings match the source loudness.
• Added a Level Compensation toggle in the menu (on by default) if you ever want to disable this.

• Recordings now capture the full tail — the last second or two is no longer trimmed when you press Stop.
• Fixed a problem where a second recording in the same session could come out empty or stop responding.
• Improved plug-in stability.
• Improvements to license handling.

• Sharper menu-bar icon on Retina and other high-resolution displays.
• The floating overlay now has a close button — hover over the overlay to reveal it, then click to hide the overlay for the session. It stays hidden while a recording is in progress so you never lose the active-capture indicator. Re-enable it any time from the menu-bar icon menu.

• Improved stability when using the plug-in in Ableton Live.
• Fixed a plug-in crash that could occur when the plug-in window was closed.
• More reliable trial and license status, with clearer handling when a trial has ended.

• Fixed garbled / double-speed recordings when capturing from a mono DAW track (e.g. the AudioRoute plug-in on a mono Logic track) and then recording in another app such as Audacity.
• Fixed wrong pitch when a second app opened the AudioRoute Input device while a capture was already running at a non-default sample rate.
• Now supports macOS 14.2 and later (previously 14.5+).
• Clearer error message when the recording folder can’t be created.

AudioRoute now works as both an instrument and an audio effect.

The new AudioRoute Capture FX shows up in your DAW’s audio-effects browser (Ableton Audio Effects, Cubase Tools, Logic Audio FX), so you can drop it straight onto any audio track — no instrument track needed. The original instrument version still works exactly as before, and existing projects are unaffected.