by Jason Snell
Installing Rogue Amoeba apps is about to get a lot easier
I love Rogue Amoeba’s Mac audio utilities, but in the Apple silicon era, installing them has been pretty rough, due to Apple requiring multiple reboots and a visit to Recovery Mode to perform a dubious-sounding reduction to a Mac’s “security policy.”
There is apparently great news on this front, however! Tucked into an otherwise perfectly nice summation of Rogue Amoeba’s year, CEO Paul Kafasis wrote:
We’ll soon be shipping updates that simplify things immensely. In fact, Airfoil, Audio Hijack, and Piezo will feature an installer-free setup that won’t even need your administrator password. Meanwhile, Loopback and SoundSource will use a new audio capture plugin called ARK that won’t require a single system restart. It’s going to be an incredible improvement to our user experience.
As someone who has had to reinstall Audio Hijack, Loopback, and SoundSource multiple times in the last few months… this is pretty fantastic news. (How in the world will Audio Hijack not even require an administrator password?! 1)
This has been a real pain point for more than three years, so kudos to everyone (presumably both inside Apple and at Rogue Amoeba) who worked on the problem and found a solution that lets some of macOS’s most clever and useful utilities run without these issues.
- macOS 14.2 introduced the System Audio Recording permission box shown above, but I’ve not discovered a single app that uses it… at least not yet? ↩