Rogue Amoeba SoundSource is Julian Rodgers’ Software Product Of 2020, he explains why.

I was a little slow off the mark when we started writing these Product of 2020 articles and when I came to write mine I found that two of the products which came to mind immediately had been taken! I’ll leave exactly which those were to your imagination but I think anyone who follows the blog closely will probably guess pretty quickly.

While racking my brains for a an alternative I received a phone call and the answer presented itself inthe way the phone alert behaved on my computer. I’d been too busy thinking about groundbreaking plugins or revolutionary new workflows in DAWs to remember that in exactly the same way as I namecheck my sit/stand desk in my Hardware Product of 2020 article, it’s the things we use every day which make the biggest difference to our lives and considering my working life is spent mostly being distracted by messages and phone calls while working at my Mac, SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba has been an absolute lifesaver. I’ll explain.

SoundSource takes the limited options available in the Mac OS Sound Preferences and makes them properly flexible. This is a big deal if you prioritise sound as much as we do. In the MacOS Sound Preferences you have limited control over what sound goes where. You can set your DAW to use a particular interface in the playback engine of application sound preferences but fo systemwide sounds all you can do is pictured below.

What SoundSource gives you is the ability to route each application to the interface of your choosing, at the volume of your choosing. You can also apply processing including AU plugins on a per-application level.

This might sound gimmicky and while it could be used to route your browser audio through a flanger it is an invaluable tool which can be used to solve real issues. I’ll give you my three favourite uses:

Applying Sonarworks Reference 4 speaker calibration to the output of Pro Tools at the system level without having to use Sonarworks Systemwide. I’m not a fan of Systemwide, If you change your sound settings as often as I do I find it invasive. This is totally transparent. I forget it’s there.

Using a plug-in to audition the MS signal or mono compatibility of records I like directly from Tidal using Nugen Audio’s Sig Mod. If you don’t regularly listen to music you know and admire in mono or auditioning just the sides of the MS components, I recommend it. Some music suits this treatment well and allows you to listen into the arrangements, the use of reverbs, the string or BV arrangements. You can of course import in to your DAW but why bother when you can just call up a plugin strapped across the output of your streaming service. Try listening to the sides only of music on YouTube to really hear what data compression can do to music (yikes!).

Control the level of alerts, including phone calls! Anyone with an iPhone, and iPad and a Mac knows the pandemonium which erupts when someone phones you. If you’re working on monitors or headphones and your ringtone jumps out at you like Marty McFly with his guitar at the beginning of Back To The Future you’ll know how useful it is to be able to control this and its only recently that it was pointed out to me that I can route FaceTime alerts through my Mac’s internal speakers and keep those alerts safely away from my interface. That’s worth buying SoundSource for on its own!