iChat AV Station

Back when iChat AV came out, I was itching to patch iTunes into it and hack it into a little radio station. I made it halfway with my iChat Cover Status script, but I needed something like the old BeOS Media Kit, where you could take the audio output of one application and literally patch it in as the audio input of another app at the OS level.

Sunflower seems to provide this kind of feature for Mac OS X, in a sort of hacked way. Unfortunatelty, the download seems to be broken (an invalid pre-install script that Installer refuses to run), so I won’t know until it gets fixed…

Detour is another component of what I’d need. It can route applications’ audio output to specific devices independently of each other, but it can’t create new, virtual ones—so there’s nothing besides your real audio inputs to select in iChat AV’s microphone setting. Sunflower would have created a virtual input device that would be selectable here, which you could “Detour” iTunes’ audio output into, bypassing system beeps and sound from other apps you may be running.

Still, It’s kind of funny that so long after Be’s death, you still need this much software to do what the BeOS could do natively.