2 November 2006
Audio Passthru on PowerMac
For many months, I’ve had my iPod sitting on the desk in its dock, with the speakers plugged into it. The old PowerMac sits on the floor, outputting its alerts through the built in speaker. It’s not an ideal setup, but it works, especially considering the music is more important than dings.
There are enough instances where there’s audio I do want to hear, though, like Youtube videos or such, to make the setup inconvenient. So today, I hooked up an audio patch cable to Line-in on the Mac, and the speakers to Line-out. I figured that’d be it, after all, it just works on Windows. But there was output!
I delved into the Volume control panel, and found the Input tab. The meter is going crazy as it displays the metered volume data. So the cables are right, and the port is functional. Adjusting the volume did blip the speakers, so they were also plugged in right.
And I concluded OSX just doesn’t do pass-thru. So I started looking for an app to do pass thru. After a few searches, an article turned up mentioning the Audio MIDI Setup application. And sure enough, that has an option to enable pass-thru on the Audio-in device. At this point, I only have output on the left speaker, but am blaming that on the patch cable. It could be a software problem; I’m really not sure. But an old, skinny 3.5mm patch cable seems more likely to have problems than OSX.