How I skipped the loopback driver for DAW visuals

For months the annoying part of building live music visuals on a Mac was getting the audio in. If you want an app to react to what is playing in Ableton or Logic, the usual answer is a virtual loopback driver like BlackHole. You route your output into it, then pick it as the app's input. It works, but it is fiddly to set up, easy to get wrong, and one more thing that can break in the middle of a set.

I wanted to skip that entirely, so I built the audio capture as an AUv3 plugin instead. You drop it on a track in your DAW and it reads that track's audio, does the frequency analysis right there, and sends the analysed spectrum plus the host tempo to the app over local OSC. No loopback driver, no routing, and it stays locked to your project tempo because the tempo comes straight from the host.

That was the piece that made the whole thing click for me. The app is called Echolume, it renders the visuals in Metal, and the plugin ships inside it, so there is nothing extra to install.

The other decision I want to be honest about is price. It is a one-time purchase, 19.99 dollars, no subscription. Most of the polished visual tools in this space are subscriptions and I wanted the opposite. Pay once, keep it. That makes it the premium app in my small portfolio, and I would rather explain the price than hide it.

It is live on the Mac App Store now. If you make music on a Mac and have ever fought with loopback audio, I am curious what you think.

Link to the app https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759684323