Airfoil, Audio Hijack, and more Rogue Amoeba apps now have M1-ready betas

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Macbook Air M1
Macbook Air M1 (Image credit: Daniel Bader / iMore)

What you need to know

  • All of Rogue Amoeba's apps now have Apple silicon Universal builds available in beta form.
  • Users will need to jump through some hoops to get them to work, though.

Developer Rogue Amoeba has announced that beta versions of all of its apps are now available as universal builds, making them ready to run natively on Apple silicon. That includes popular audio apps like Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Loopback, Piezo, or SoundSource.

All of these apps have betas ready to go right now, but the developer points out that there is a caveat that needs to be taken into consideration. An announcement post explains that getting the new apps to work will mean manually enabling the ACE audio handling component that they need. And that's going to take a little messing around.

If you use Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Loopback, Piezo, or SoundSource, you may already be familiar with the name "ACE". ACE is the audio handling component which powers these applications, making it possible for them to capture and adjust audio from other apps on your Mac.On MacOS 11 (Big Sur), installing ACE for the first time requires authorizing it with the OS, and on M1 chip-based Macs, that setup has a few extra steps. The in-app installer provides an overview and will get you up and running in just a few minutes.

There's a guide that explains what the process entails, but ultimately it means restarting your Mac a couple of times to enable ACE to run via an M1 Mac's Recovery environment. Not a huge problem, but less than idea. And as Rogue Amoeba points out, this is a one-time job.

You can go get the beta versions of Rogue Amoeba's apps right now, if you're so inclined.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.