Using Soundflower with GarageBand

This page describes how to use the free Soundflower "virtual audio device" with GarageBand. The reason I'm writing this is to inform others of this excellent utility and to be a guide to setting it up.

I have a Dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 (Quicksilver 2002) and also a Formac Studio DV/TV. The problem I had was that I wanted to use the sound inputs on the Studio DV/TV to record things into GarageBand. These instructions should also work for capturing sound from a Firewire DV video camera into GarageBand.

Getting Started

For starters, download the free Soundflower utility or visit Cycling '74's Home Page to find it. Installation is simple, just like any other application. A reboot is required to activate Soundflower because it is a system extension.

After installation, you will need to go to the Sound pane on the System Preferences. Go to the Output tab and choose Soundflower (2ch), then go to the Input tab and choose Soundflower (2ch). You should also go to the Sound Effect tab and select Built-in audio controller so that any system alerts do not get routed through Soundflower.




Next, fire up the excellent freeware Vidi by Mitz Pettel or Formac's StudioTVR software. Select the input you want such as Composite or S-Video (or just choose a TV channel). At this point, you won't hear any sound coming out your speakers...this is normal.


Finally, start GarageBand and create a new project. Open the Preferences and select Audio/MIDI. Choose Soundflower (2ch) for the audio input and selct Built-in audio controller for the audio output.


Close the Preferences window and then create a new Basic Track and then double-click on the new track (or you can press Apple-I or click on the "i" button) to open the Track Info window. Click on the Monitor On radio button.

At this point, you should be able to hear the sound from you Vidi (or whatever application you're using). You can close the Track Info and start recording in GarageBand.

Conclusions

Although this is a bit painful to setup, it is a pretty cheap way to get audio into GarageBand...that is if you already own a video capture device like this. I'm thinking I will eventually get something like the Edirol UA-20 which gives me MIDI and audio capture with GarageBand, this will do for now. Please feel free to send comments or suggestions on ways to improve this page, or with other applications for Soundflower. E-mail me at: I hope this helped!

Last update to this page on: Wed Feb 4 22:08:34 PST 2004