Question

I want to develop an application for Mac OS X to record audio from one application.

I played around with Soundflower, but it only grabs the full system audio.
I know that I have to use a HAL plug-in. This plug-in is loaded from an application that uses Core Audio and then I can communicate with the plug-in to grab the audio.

My question is: How does such a plug-in look like? Are there examples on the internet? I have not found anything about this topic.

Answer 1

Now that you’ve decided that using Cocoa injection is a feasible solution to your problem, let’s start there.

What you need to do is find out how the ObjC classes in the app are setting up to play audio, and hook in to set a different AU in place of the default system out.

There are two options (besides writing your own custom AU from scratch, which you don’t need to do). You can use AUHAL as the AU, and capture the data from AUHAL. This is a bit easier from the point of view of hooking things up, but it means you have to write the code that renderers and saves the audio. Or you can just hook in a save-to-file AU, which is a bit harder to hook up, but once you do it takes care of rendering automatically.

So, how do you hook things in? Well, most of the higher-level CA calls are written to just write to the current output. If the app is doing things that way, you just need to hook in at startup to find your replacement AU and set it as the current output, in place of the default. On the other hand, if the app is writing directly to an AU that it stores in a variable, you have to hook it to store your AU as a variable. And if it’s building a graph of AUs, you either replace the default output, or stick yours in front of it, in the graph.

See TN2091 for some sample code fragments for most of the hard parts for most of the possibilities. It doesn’t show you how to put them together, and it’s got a lot more about setting inputs than outputs (because that’s harder), and the terminology can get confusing, but if you read it carefully, you should be able to find the parts you need.

If you haven’t yet built a simple AU host and AU plugin before, you really should take the time to work through the whole Audio Unit Development Fundamentals guide. (And if you don’t think you really need to know all that to do something simple, you’re wrong. Why CoreAudio is Hard explains half of the reason; the changes between OS X versions versions are the other half of the reason.)

You probably also want to look at CocoaDev’s CoreAudioAndAudioUnitsTutorial page for a placeholder page for a complete tutorial that nobody’s ever written, with links to a lot of useful stuff.

Meanwhile, if injecting the whole MTCoreAudio framework into the app is feasible, it comes with a ton of nice, complete samples. In fact, even if you aren’t going to use the framework, it’s worth reading the Overview documentation, and possibly the source code.