If you have ever wanted to feed your system audio into a Skype call – for example, you’re recording a podcast and you want to play a clip from a song or a movie or a voicemail from a listener and you want the other person on your call to hear it and you also want it to come through cleanly on your recording – then this might help (assuming you’re on a Mac).
I’ve wanted to do this for ages and just figured it out. As it turns out, it wasn’t difficult at all and I should have taken the time to work it out ages ago. So I’m writing this for anyone else who might go searching for a solution.
Here are the apps you’ll need to install:
1. Audio Hijack
2. Soundflower
Steps.
1. Set up a new Audio Hijack session we below. So what you’ll end up with is two audio inputs – your mic and your system audio (or you could make the second one an app, like iTunes or Chrome, etc) feeding into your headphones and then through to Soundflower.
2. Once you’ve done that, open up your Skype settings and set “input” to Soundflower.
Once you’ve done that – you’re set.
Turn on Audio Hijack my clicking the round button in the lower left corner.
When you want to feed your secondary audio source into Skype, just click the secondary source node in Audio Hijack and set its status to “on”.
When you have finished with that piece of audio, turn its status back to “off”.
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Using Audio Hijack and Soundflower to feed System Audio into Skype
The Soundflower installer for OSX 10.11 (El Capitan) and macOS Sierra 10.12 is available at https://www.fluxforge.com/blog/soundflower-os-x-10.11-10.12-macOS-sierra/.
Thanks for this Cameron. Is there an alternative to Soundflower? I can’t seem to get it installed on my mac.
Has this changed in more recent versions of MacOS?
I’m on 10.12.1 and as long as I use the system audio (Macbook Air) my system audio is shared with whoever I’m sharing my screen. On windows it’s a whole different story. I have to use some sort of audio driver to act as a loop cable (virtual audio cable).
When using a different sound option (Microsoft Lifechat) it didn’t work anymore, even when all programs were set to use it (Skype, Adobe Audition, MacOS).
I just wanted to know why it works for the internal speakers and microphone (even when using earphones (4 conductor))…
Hi,
Have you found a solution for this yet? On Windows, I select share system sounds and then share screen (I’m using an older version of Skype (7.4), the new one doesn’t work well) and whatever sound source I use gets shared (I use an external audio interface).
But on the Mac it only works with internal speakers… 🙁
I didn’t want to spend 50 bucks on Audio Hikack to do something I do for free on Windows…
this is an amazing solution. got it working on mac using soundflower for mac on El Capitan in mere minutes. Thanks for sharing!